Using percentages in BOMs

For companies using liquid in mixes/blends you may want to be able to specify a percentage of the overall blend that a raw material makes up. Please note that all of the raw materials must be able to be entered as percentages for this feature to work properly.

To start, in the company preferences enable "Allow BOM component to be percentages" under the Inventory Preferences.

Next open the items that are components (raw materials) on the BOM which you will want to set as percentages. Go to the Other tab and specify the Produced As conversion rate and UOM. This will be used to specify how much of a certain raw material will be needed when calculating the percentage of the mix that it makes up.

Once all of the components have the Produced As conversion rates set, open the assembly with the components you want to set as percentages (or create a new assembly). On the Bill of Materials screen check the Use Qty as a % box. This will add a new columns to the components grid where the percentage can be entered and the calculated quantity required for the assembly will be displayed. In addition, the total % will shown at the bottom to ensure you are at 100% and the total calculated amount of the raw materials needed will be shown at the bottom.

One example of this would be using components which are stored in pounds to create a mix which is measured in gallons. In general, the system will allow you to specify a Used As unit of measure and a Used As conversion rate to convert the pounds into gallons when producing the mix. The problem with this is that while I may know the exact number of pounds needed for each gallon, I am not sure how many gallons a component will require without doing a bunch of math. Generally, components in mixes are measured and adjusted by percentages with the goal of being able to enter a percentage that a component is of a mix and based on the output expected and the pounds per gallon, which is a fixed amount, the system should tell me how many gallons of the raw material I need for the mix. By enabling quantities to be entered as percentages this is something we can accomplish. Lets step through an example.

If a particular component takes up 10% of a mix which yielded 1 gallon, the system would then look at the Produced As conversion rate of the component to determine how many gallons of the component would be needed. In this case if I entered 10 in the Produced As conversion rate, the system would know that 10 pounds of this component would equal 1 gallon, so .1 gallons will be required for the mix. By doing this we allow known conversion rates to be set in stone at the component level which will never change (in this case the PPG) and allow easy adjustments to the quantity of a component that is used on a bill of material through tweaking percentages. Once a percentage is tweaked, an easy to use final quantity, in this case the gallons required will be displayed to the user.