Rolling up material and resource costs in BOMs

[j.hendrickson]

What is the recommended approach to including resource costs in Bill of Materials?  I like the idea of rolling up the costs of the components but without the resource/overhead costs associated with the manufacturing of the product the rolled up cost isn't worth much.

Alternatively, is there a way to override the rolled up cost, especially when adding said item to another BOM?  It seems like adding a Supplier entry for the item would allow that but I can't get the system to use that cost over the rolled up cost.

Any help is appreciated.  Thanks!

Joe Hendrickson

[dvirh]

Joe,

The 'Out Of The Box' cost rollup on the components is a basic rollup that will not allow you to add any additional costs for e.g. resources. Your best option in this case will be to completely ignore the Sourcing Tab automatic cost rollup and create your own custom rollup field. You can create such fields in the BOM tab and include data from the Item Details page, the BOM tab, and even the unit cost from the Sourcing tab. WIth a custom rollup field you can choose to use costs on the Assembly level as Overrides or as Adjustors. In your case, if you use costs in the Assembly level as Adjustors, you can store the resources cost on the assembly level and add those costs to the cost of the components.

If the above does not work for you, an alternative approach will be to create a custom cost field on the Item Details page of each item that represents the fully loaded cost of the item. This cost can come from a script for example. Then you can create a custom rollup field that will rollup these custom cost fields.

[j.hendrickson]

So if assemblies always use the rolled up cost on BOMs and ignore the unit cost from Sourcing, why are there warnings on the Sourcing tab when a default cost isn't chosen and another warning saying the cost in BOMs will be zero, which we know isn't true because they use the roll up cost.  Can you explain how these warnings are accurate?

Screenshot attached.

[dvirh]

This is an interesting scenario that I hope is not very common. I guess the short answer is that these two messages are incompatible with each other and I consider it a bug that they both appear together. The correct behavior is as stated in your posting. I will report the bug and target to resolve it in a future release. 

[j.hendrickson]

So I tried the suggestion to create a custom rollup field but I couldn't find "Unit Cost" as a choice for the Roll Up Source when creating the field.  Only "Baseline Total Cost" was available.  If I choose that one then the column comes up blank.  What is "Baseline Total Cost"?

If I could choose "Unit Cost" then I would also choose the Sum with Override function so that each line on the BOM would show the "Unit Cost" from the Sourcing tab if we've defined it, otherwise it would roll up the unit costs of the children.  Essentially this would duplicate the pre-loaded "Total Cost" field but would use "Unit Cost" from the Sourcing tab if available, just as we were hoping.  Is this possible?

Thanks.

[j.hendrickson]

I have been all around the PLM 360 universe since this thread started, but I've circled back and am finding that my users still need a solution to this.

Good news is that Sourcing:Unit Cost is now an available field for BOM rollup.  However, it only results in a value if the "Sum with Adjustment" function is chosen, but even then it doesn't actually do the adjustment, just rolls up the children costs.  "Sum with Override" results in a 0 value.

So I'm still stuck.  I'm looking for some help to meet the following requirements:

1. If a unit cost is entered for an item on the Sourcing tab then that unit cost is available to see and use on BOMs, whether the item has a BOM associated with it or not.

2. It would be a bonus if the rollup function could be dependent upon some other field which would indicate whether the default unit cost or a rollup of the components should be used.  This is necessary as some assemblies are built in house where component and resource costs are well known and directly impact the loaded cost vs other assemblies that are outsourced where it makes more sense to simply use the supplier's price.

I am open to using scripting or computed fields but I see limitations with each.  How can scripting be automatically kicked off as the Sourcing tab is updated?  Can computed fields access information in the Sourcing tab?

How have others dealt with this situation?

Thanks.

Joe Hendrickson

[dvirh]

Hi Joe,

Sorry for the previous reply, I just erased it. I did some more test and I'm actually not able to reproduce your rollup issue. Can you please contact me directly so that we can see what is different in your setup? hagay.dvir@autodesk.com

[Esky99!]

Hi

Was there a result to this issue?

Regards

Paul

[dvirh]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the reminder! Joe and I continued the conversation offline and this will be a good time to update the forum on the results.

The discussion was specifically about rolling up the built-in Unit Cost field using a custom Rollup formula. There are two rollup formulas that we could use for cost rollups - Rollup with Adjustment and Rollup with Override. Here is what we found out:

1. Rollup with Adjustment is rolling up the data properly
2. Rollup with Override is not working properly. The reason for this is that when an Assembly does not have a quote associated with it, the system is automaticlaly assigning it a Unit Cost of $0. So the Rollup value is always $0.
3. In both cases we are showing the wrong Unit Cost for Assemblies. The reason for this is that the built-in rollup function is still valid and works by using the Unit Cost field to show either the Unit Cost for parts, or the rollup of the Unit Cost field for assemblies. It simply never shows the Unit Cost that is associated with the Assembly. 

I have reported bugs on both of these issues. I expect that we will fix the problem with the Rollup with Override with a high priority and the problem with showing the wrong Unit Cost for Assemblies at a normal priority.