The team at Leverage Technologies recently blogged about SAP Business One 9.1 – the Q4 2014 release of SAP Business One. Let’s take a more detailed look at the manufacturing enhancements in SAP Business One 9.1

The manufacturing enhancements in SAP Business One 9.1 are detailed in two broad categories – MRP (additional data sources) and the enhanced production module.

SAP Business One 9.1 MRP (Material Requirements Planning):

SAP Business One 9.1 includes enhancements to the widely used MRP module for production (and purchase) planning. SAP Business One 9.1 introduces new fields into the MRP selection and execution process to optimize the recommendations made through the SAP MRP process. Some of the new fields and options include:

• Selection of component warehouse for manufacturing items.
• A new option to set the inventory level to maximum (if inventory level is less than minimum).
• An option to select multiple MRP forecasts for MRP recommendations.

SAP Business One 9.1 Enhanced Production Module

The SAP Business One 9.1 release includes a new production resources module, enhanced bill of materials and new production process options. Let’s look at these enhancements in more detail:

SAP Business One 9.1 resources module – this new module will assist with resource capacity planning. Users can now capture machine, labour and other resources and costs against the manufacturing process. Resource capacity can be allocated. A new column allows the user to record consumption of resources and items beyond the planned consumption. This will greatly assist production planners to identity available production capacity and bottlenecks whilst ensuring that resource / labour costs are correctly allocated to the finished product.

SAP Business One 9.1 bill of materials enhancements – to facilitate the new enhanced production modules in SAP Business One 9.1 the bill of materials has been enhanced with additional line item types (resource and text). Options have been added to group line items based on process flow and to mass update bills of material. This will allow for easier maintenance of the bills of material.

A by-product handling method is now supported for by-product components in the production process.

SAP Business One 9.1 is due for final release in Q4 2014 – the manufacturing enhancements included in this updated version of SAP Business One is just one of many enhancements made by SAP.