Overview of Discrete Manufacturing

You can use Oracle Work in Process to produce assemblies in discrete batches, also known as discrete jobs.

Standard Versus Non-Standard Jobs

Standard discrete jobs control the material, resources, and operations required to build an assembly and collect its manufacturing cost.

Non-standard discrete jobs control material and collect costs for miscellaneous manufacturing activity. They may or may not build an assembly. This type of activity can include rework, field service repair, upgrade, disassembly, maintenance, engineering prototypes, and other projects. See: Overview of Non-Standard Discrete Jobs

Discrete Versus Lot Based Jobs

A discrete job is a production order for the manufacture of a specific (discrete) quantity of an assembly, using a specific standard routing and operations.

If you have Oracle Shop Floor Management installed, you can use lot based jobs in your manufacturing. A lot based job follows a network routing. Network routings provide flexibility in choosing the next operation which, in turn, determines the series of operations the job moves through. See: Creating a Network Routing and Creating a Lot Based Job in the Oracle Shop Floor Management User's Guide.

Shop Floor Control

Shop floor control helps you manage the flow of production inside the plant. Routings can be used to schedule job production activities and create requirements. You can use reports and views to help you control these activities.

Discrete Execution Workstation

The Discrete Execution Workstation provides a single interface to perform multiple shop floor functions, without navigating to a number of transaction windows. This Manufacturing Execution System (MES) provides three functional modes including Administrator, Supervisor, and Operator. See: Overview of the Discrete Execution Workstation, Oracle Manufacturing Execution System for Discrete Manufacturing

Material Control

Material control helps you manage the flow of component material from inventory to jobs. Bills of material can be used to create job material requirements. You can use reports and views to help you control material activities.

Non-Standard Job Bills of Material and Routings

You can assign a predefined bill of material or routing to a non-standard job or create one manually. You may use any bill or routing for the job, including one that does not match the assembly item of the job.

Engineering Bills and ECOs

You can build released as well as unreleased revisions and engineering items. You can also add engineering items as material requirements. The system can automatically update your jobs following an engineering change order (ECO).

You can create ECOs and pass down the information to unreleased jobs to specify a cumulative quantity, a range of jobs, or implement changes for specific lots. You can also add, change, or disable - items, operations, resources, and attributes. See: Defining ECO Revised Items in the Engineering User's Guide.

Processing Options

When you define discrete jobs, you can create discrete job operations, resource requirements, and material requirements either concurrently or interactively. Interactive processing loads all bill of material and routing information while you wait, returning control to you after the process is complete. Concurrent processing spawns a background process that loads all bill of material and routing information and returns control to you immediately.

Lot and Serial Control

You can build jobs for assemblies under lot control, serial control, or both lot and serial control.

You can track your jobs using serial control throughout the manufacturing process. This enables you to assign, perform serial transaction entry, import serial numbers, and print serial number labels. This functionality is supported through Oracle Mobile Supply Chain Applications. See: Serial Number Tracking Throughout Manufacturing

Work Order Interface

You can import planned order and planned order update recommendations for discrete jobs from external systems into Work in Process. See: Work Order Interface, Oracle Integration Repository at http://irep.oracle.com

Requirements and Assembly Netting

You can specify whether a job's material requirements are included as demand in the MRP netting process. You can also specify whether the assemblies you build on a job are included as supply.

MPS Relief

When you build an MPS-Planned item using a job, the master schedule for the quantity you define is automatically updated (relieved).

Simulate Discrete Jobs

You can simulate a standard job to determine what materials, operations, and operation resources are required to support that job. You can convert your simulated job into an actual job. See: Simulating and Saving Simulated Jobs.

Available-to-Promise Materials

You can view component available-to-promise (ATP) information as you define, simulate, and view discrete jobs.

Reservation of Discrete Jobs as Supply Source

You can use the Item Reservation window in Oracle Inventory to create reservations for material based on discrete jobs as a source of supply. You can also reserve completed serialized assemblies for demand: a reservation record is created by selecting and reserving specific serialized assemblies against a sales order line. See: Item Reservations

Final Assembly Orders

You can manually or automatically define jobs (final assembly orders) to build custom configurations for assemble-to-order products. You can allocate your discrete production by sales channel using demand classes. You can retain as-built configuration histories for quality and customer service tracking.

Job Close

You can close several standard and non-standard discrete jobs simultaneously. You can also close individual discrete jobs. See: Overview of Discrete Job Close.

Job Costs

You can cost standard and non-standard asset discrete production by job. You can report job cost on a period-to-date and cumulative-to-date basis. See: Discrete Job and Repetitive Schedule Costs

Job Purge

You can purge all information associated with discrete jobs including job header records and job detail and transaction information. You can also selectively purge some or all of the following job related information: job details (material requirements, resource requirements, and operations), ATO configurations, move transactions, and resource cost transactions.

View Workflows

You can view the status of workflows used for tracking outside processing of assemblies. Workflows automatically send notifications and activate processes during specific manufacturing points. You can display a graphical display of the status of workflows from the Tools menu in the Discrete Jobs and View Discrete Jobs windows.

Constraint-based Scheduling

Oracle provides constraint-based scheduling enabling you to schedule discrete jobs and operations based on priorities, resources, and material availability. Production Scheduling is a constraint-based automated scheduling tool using sophisticated scheduling algorithms. It optimizes production, enforcing minimum run length constraints, and minimizing changeover times on your resources. See: Oracle Production Scheduling Implementation Guide

Label Printing at Completion

Label printing capabilities are available at the time of completion. This provides the ability to create labels for any descriptive information or customer requirements. See: Label Printing at Completion