MPP with multiple Itemtypes

オフライン

Hello,

I have a use case where I wanted to be able to use the MPP module to create process plans for more than one itemtype, ex. some process plans are based on parts and some are based on another itemtype. Is this possible? I know that you can use a custom itemtype instead of parts but as far as I understand it, you replace parts with your custom itemtype as the produced object of the process plan. Can you have multiple options at the same time?

Regards

Rick

  • Hi Rick,

    you can customize a lot in MPP, but you will soon realize that some customization require massive changes. Does your second ItemType contain a multilevel-bom or is it a more simple ItemType? Do you want to be able something similar like building a MBOM from a EBOM with all the validation checks?

    The EBOM/MBOM functionality is optimzied for Part. It analyzes the Part structure to get an EBOM. One step that happens here is that MPP breaks done multilevel BOMs to a plain singlelevel structure. The corresponding Methods is quite huge. So this use case would definitely not become easy.

  • 0 オフライン in reply to AngelaIp

    Hi Angela,

    The idea was to have a custom itemtype with a similar structure to part and to be able to build process plans with either itemtype as the "produced part". But since the built-in way of using a custom itemtype in the MPP seems to replace part instead of adding the other itemtype as an option I suspected that having two options would require a lot of changes to the internal workings of the MPP. I looked at poly items since they can turn into multiple other itemtypes, but it didn't seem like a solution since the actual itemtypes would still have their own realationshiptypes that need to work in the MPP. I might try to solve it with part classifications instead, but it's a bit messy.

  • Hi Rick,

    Could you elaborate on your use case for wanting to use multiple ItemTypes at once with MPP? I haven't previously been aware of a customer using both the standard Part ItemType and a custom ItemType to represent BOM data. However, I can pass along the use case to one of our Project Managers to consider for future development of MPP. 

    Chris

    Christopher Gillis

    Aras Labs Software Engineer

  • Hi Chris,

    The idea was to use the MPP in combination with "generic items" similar to the ones used in the variant manager sample application in order to make generic process definitions, but we would also like to be able to make normal process plans as well.

    Regards

    Rick

  • Hi Rick,

    That's an interesting use case! I've passed this request along, and I'll reply here if I hear any updates on it. :) 

    One thing that might satisfy your use case for the time being is to add a new classification(s) to Part that would be used for "generic items". Classifications can have their own Forms, Properties, etc., so you could likely do most if not all of what you're looking for with that approach.

    Chris