ERP and CPQ with dynamic bills of materials for make-to-order manufacturers

Manufacturers that produce highly configurable products to order can utilize Steersman’s suite of business applications to dynamically manage thousands or millions of unique bills of materials, pricing, and selling products based on component costs, labor, and margins without manually managing each bill of materials (BOM). We make it easy to manage data and publish products to the web for customers or sales representatives to shop or configure. For configurable products, we enable configurable BOMs.

Create simple rules to define and price thousands of unique BOMs

Take a custom bicycle as an example - a customer can select from five wheel options, three gear mechanism options, two brake options, three seat options, four frame sizes, three crank options, eight colors, and other choices. If you multiply them all together, you can get several thousand unique combinations with unique bills of materials, or even hundreds of thousands if there are enough choices.

Steersman allows a company to define components based on combinations of product attributes:

• If a customer wants the seat option “B” and frame size “Small” or “Medium”, then the bike gets a seat post product “XYZ”
• All bikes except those with the gear mechanism “C” get a bike bell product “ABC”
• All bikes get their corresponding bicycle frame assembly, in a size and color corresponding to the finished bicycle options selected

The same setup can be used for manufacturing machinery with various options, measurement instrumentation with a range of sensor combination possibilities, semi-custom furniture such as kitchen cabinets, windows, and industrial pump assemblies, as well as other products, including complex kits.

With our ERP application suite for make-to-order manufacturers, a company can define a hundred thousand distinct BOMs via two or three hundred rules like those in the examples above. Furthermore, if a component in an assembly must change, you change the rule, and all BOMs for the product from now on will be the “new” way. You can read more about Steersman’s dynamic BOM application for Odoo ERP here.

Ecommerce website configurator and pricing management

All data setup for a product in the ERP is fully synchronized with the website, which presents the product along with its options to clients.

When a website user shops for the product, our ecommerce technology looks up the components that would be used in that product configuration, any labor or other costs added aside from the component materials, adds them all up, applies a margin defined for the product, and provides a live price.

Alternatively, a website can be set to allow customers to specify what they think they need and request a quote, without seeing a price.

Product setup and how it shows to clients

Watch a detailed video walking through the whole set of Steersman’s CPQ (configure, price, quote) apps. This is not one of those 1-minute clips that claim we do all anybody ever needs without giving any details. So, grab some cookies and hunker down for 17 minutes to walk through an example and see how it’s all set up.

You can learn more about Steersman’s CPQ and dynamic BOM management for manufacturing here, including seeing demo websites.

Odoo ERP for managing the business

Steersman’s proprietary suite of advanced applications for semi-custom product manufacturers - the dynamic bill of material app, the pricing engine, the ecommerce configurator application, and checkout - all work on top of the Odoo ERP system.

Odoo is a modular ERP with 8 million users worldwide. It costs as little as $37/user/month and is designed to run small and medium-sized businesses end-to-end. It is designed to be easy to use and scalable.

Odoo includes applications for managing inventory, manufacturing, accounting, sales, purchasing, projects, and many other general business processes. Steersman helps manufacturing, retail, and ecommerce businesses get set up on Odoo ERP and offers our suite of 100+ proprietary applications designed to give a competitive advantage to our clients. You can learn more about Odoo ERP on our Solutions page.