Working with the Order Browser and Order Analysis 

Purpose

You work with the order browser if you want to clearly display the multi-level BOM for a sales order item, on a central screen. From the order browser you can navigate to the editing and reporting functions for order BOMs and, if necessary, variant configuration.

Prerequisites

You have created a sales order and entered a material in a sales order item.

If you work with variant configuration, you have set the Order BOM indicator and selected result-oriented in the configuration profile for the configurable materials. When you entered the sales order, you assigned values to the class characteristics that are assigned to the material in the sales order item.

Process Flow

The process flow when editing an order BOM with the order browser can be as follows:

  1. Enter the required data on the initial screen. You can find further information in Call up the Order Browser and Order Analysis

If you work with Variant Configuration, the result of the BOM explosion depends on whether you have completely assigned values to the characteristics and whether you have fixed the bill of material.

Configurable assemblies are displayed in the order browser as follows:

In variant configuration, if you have...

Then the system displays ...

Changed or manually fixed a configurable assembly

The order BOM

Assigned values completely to a configurable assembly, but have not fixed it

The material BOM components resulting from the assignment of Characteristic Values

Have not assigned values to a configurable assembly

Only the non-variable parts, in other words, those components, which do not have Object Dependencies

  1. You call up order analysis and have an overview of all the assemblies in the multi-level BOM for the sales order item. You see, for instance:

These assemblies are only displayed in the order analysis and not in the order browser.

If you need to, you can switch back to the order analysis between the following steps, to look at the current status.
  1. You call up the order browser. In the overview tree you display the branches you are interested in.
  1. You go directly to variant configuration, to assign values to the class characteristics for the subordinate configurable assemblies.

We recommend you specify a time when the configuration is complete. Only then should you start processing the order BOMs. If you call up variant configuration again after this time, and then save your data, you should remember that this causes the material BOMs to be adjusted. In variant configuration, changes to the configuration model, in other words, to material BOMs, object dependencies etc., have higher priority. Therefore, you should only edit bills of material in variant configuration in situations where changes to material BOMs should be transferred to the order BOMs
  1. If you want to make different changes to an assembly that is used more than once, you first have to replace the material on one of the nodes.
  1. If you want to make sales-order-specific changes to an assembly that has not yet been saved as order-specific you should fix the material BOM.
  1. You go to the single-level order BOMs and carry out the necessary changes there.
  1. Transfer bills of material to Project System if necessary.

We recommend you assign IDs to the components as soon as possible, where the material number is to be replaced. These should also be fixed. Only then should you transfer the bills of material to Project System. By doing this you avoid additional postprocessing.

  1. Go to the BOM explosion screens if you need to, so you can display and print the multi-level BOM.

We recommend that, after every change to a bill of material (for instance, after a revaluation in variant configuration, or after fixing or editing a single-level order BOM) you click , so that the system explodes the bill of material again and displays the current status. This is important if you change a component quantity, for example. This can lead to the system selecting a different alternative BOM during Alternative Determination

Alternatively to that, in the order browser screen you can set: Setting the indicator Autom. Update. When you do this, the system updates the multi-level BOM after each change.