About the product hierarchy

Important: AVEVA™ Production Management introduces the ability to define materials, but retains the ability to define products. Future development of AVEVA™ Production Management will phase out products and use only materials. Meanwhile, you may have to maintain materials and products, depending on the modules that your project uses.

If your project uses only materials, you are not required to add products to the project. If your project has modules that use products rather than materials, it is good practice to add a corresponding material for each product that you add. By doing this, your project is able to make a smooth transition when AVEVA™ Production Management phases out products and uses only materials in every module.

Like materials, products are the substances that the plant uses and produces: raw materials, work-in-process, and finished goods. Additionally, products are goods with similar characteristics for purposes of planning, scheduling, processing, and so on.

In AVEVA™ Production Management, you define each product that the plant uses and produces to identify the role of the product in the manufacturing process. By grouping products together, you can design a product-centric, rather than plant-centric view, of what the plant produces.

• If your project uses Recipe, your project requires products to set up recipes. See, Add and configure a recipe.

• If your project uses Quality, your project requires products to set up threshold ranges for product specifications. See, Add and configure a Quality threshold range.

What are product definitions

Product definitions are typically used to:

• Identify product specifications for the Quality module.

• Identify the product name for recording with events associated with certain modules.

You would typically create product definitions for distinct products rather than for each variation of a product. You can use OLE-DB lookups to other data sources, or calendar lookups to handle specifications or parameters that change for a given product type.

Each product type requires a unique ID value so that various modules can reference the product. For example, the Quality module uses the Quality Specifications of a Product Type to check whether each production run is in or out of specification.

If a field records the product type, set the FieldIDType property of the field to ProductID.

Related topics

• Add and configure a product hierarchy

• Add a product group

• About Quality field specifications

• About the material model