Flattened BOM and Bug Fix
Flattened BOM
I don’t know about you, but we use a ton of nested BOM’s (Bills of Materials). It’s a great way to keep your complex products neatly organized so you can quickly scan a BOM without sifting through hundreds, or thousands, of individual parts. And, if you share subassemblies across multiple products, nested BOM’s make it easy to track WIP subassemblies.
However, there can be too much of a good thing. While nested BOM’s solve some problems, they can make it harder to verify that a Part is on the BOM. If you find yourself bopping in and out and down the tree of a complex BOM, you know how frustrating it can be to verify that 1/2”x 3” bolts are on this BOM!
Usually, we see this hunt start when something is amiss. We go to make a product and the needed parts are not on the shelf. What happened? Why didn’t purchasing get the hardware on order? Is it on the BOM?? Commence the hunt!
It used to be that the Picklist could help, because it was always flattened down to only parts. But, we improved the Picklist so it could work better in a subassembly flow (pick finished subs, rather than all parts). The new Picklist is definitely better for picking, but we lost the ability to use it for parts searching.
We’ve added in a Flattened Bill of Materials command in the Product page to return a table of all the parts used in a product, with all subassemblies flattened down to their composing parts. The table is searchable, sortable, and exportable so you can sift through the data however you like. Each part in the list is a link so you can bop over to the corresponding Part page and look at it’s reverse BOM, check out the ordering info, and review the transaction log.
Here’s a quick screencast of the new command in action…
QuickBooks Bug Fix
If you use the QuickBooks integration to pull in Invoices or Estimates and convert them to Sales Orders, you may have hit some errors recently. We introduced a bug a while back that wouldn’t allow you to create a new customer in Off the Shelf from the QuickBooks import screen. This is pretty useful when you’ve got a new customer with their first order and want to quickly add the customer and convert their invoice to a Sales Order.
The bug has been squashed, and you can once again create a new customer during a QuickBooks Invoice (or Estimate) import. Sorry about that!