Phantom Assemblies

Phantom assemblies are non-stocked items that group material needed to produce an assembly or a subassembly. You can specify how phantom components and routing resources and overheads are charged, as well as whether phantom subassemblies will have their own operation sequence numbers or inherit the operation sequence numbers of their parent assemblies.

In Work in Process, phantom parent and high level assemblies conform to the standard APICS defined behavior, however, phantom subassemblies do not have individual identities and become a collection of their components. Work in Process does not recognize the phantom subassembly itself, and only sees and lists the individual phantom components on the bills of material for Discrete jobs and Repetitive schedules (although the phantom subassembly is recognized and planned for in Master Planning and Scheduling (MRP).

Phantom subassembly component costs are included in the higher level phantom assembly cost, and the components automatically inherit the operation sequence number of the parent assembly. Resource costs and overhead for these components, however, are not considered in the parent or higher level assembly cost. You have the option to specify that phantom subassemblies and their resources are visible in Work in Process and are charged by Oracle Cost Management. You also can specify that phantom subassemblies maintain their own operation sequence numbers and that their resource and overhead costs are charged to the parent or higher level assembly by setting up two parameters in Oracle Bills of Material.

Bills of Material Parameters for Phantoms

If you want Work in Process to maintain the individual operation sequence numbers for phantom subassemblies, and to charge their resource and overhead costs to the parent or higher level assembly, you set the following two parameters in Oracle Bills of Material:

BOM:Use Phantom Routings

Set this parameter to specify if phantom routing resource costs (including outside processing resources assigned to phantom routing operations) are charged to the parent or higher level assembly. Setting this parameter also implies department inheritance for resources; thus, phantom resources can be used by departments that they are not owned by or assigned to as a borrowed resource. Resource overhead costs are always charged to the department owning the resource, not the higher level assembly. You set the parameter at the inventory organization level and it then applies to all phantoms within a single inventory organization. These are its two values:

BOM:Inherit Phantom Op Seq

Set this parameter to specify whether phantom subassembly components inherit the operation sequence number of their parent or higher level assembly, or maintain their own operation sequence number. This parameter is set at the inventory organization level, and applies to all phantoms within a single inventory organization. The parameter has these two values:

Routing and Routing Revision Numbers

Phantom subassembly routings for Discrete jobs and Repetitive schedules use the primary routing, and Flow schedules use the first priority routing. Phantoms with routing revisions use the routing revision number and date assigned when the job or schedule is defined. If these values are Null, the routing revision dates are defaulted to the job start date or the first unit start date.

Assemble To Order (ATO) Phantoms

Component, resource, and overhead costs for Assemble To Order items defined as model or option types are defined on the item's configured bill of material as phantoms. They differ from typical phantoms in that their component and routing costs are not charged to the parent or higher level assembly, and they are not affected by the setting of either of these two Bills of Material parameters.