What Is a BOR Item Type in a Routing? EDGEBIC Definition

A BOR item type says what kind of thing a routing position refers to: a product, a work center step, a raw material, or a sub-assembly component. In EDGEBIC by User Solutions, the bill of routing is the recipe for making a product, and every position in that recipe is classified by one of four item types. The item type is how the engine knows whether a line is work to be scheduled or a thing to be consumed.

Think of a recipe card. Some rows name an ingredient you take out of the pantry. Some rows name a task you perform at a particular station. Some rows name something you made earlier that week and are now folding in. They all sit on the same card, but they mean different things, and you would not treat them the same way when planning your afternoon.

For the broader vocabulary of planning, see the manufacturing glossary.

How a BOR Item Type Works

A routing is a list of positions. Read it top to bottom and it tells the whole story of how a product gets made. But the story mixes two different kinds of statement: statements about work, and statements about things.

The item type separates them. Four values exist:

Product marks the item the routing is about. It usually sits at the root of a routing, the way "Widget A" sits at the top of Widget A's recipe. It names the output.

Work Center marks an operation performed at a station. This is the type that represents real work: CNC milling as step 10, welding as step 20. A Work Center position carries the hours, the setup, and the capacity claim.

Material marks a raw input consumed at that point in the routing. Steel plate consumed at step 5. It is an input to be available, not an operation to be scheduled.

Component marks a sub-assembly consumed by the step. A gearbox sub-assembly fitted at step 30. Unlike a raw material, a component was itself manufactured, so it carries a timing relationship: it has to exist before the step that fits it can run.

The consequence is direct. Only Work Center positions consume finite capacity. Material positions do not compete for a machine, so they never inflate the load on a station. Component positions bring a dependency, so the parent step waits on the sub-assembly rather than starting whenever the machine is free.

A Concrete Example

You are building a pump. The routing reads like this.

At the root sits the pump itself, a Product position. It names what the routing makes.

Step 5 is a Material position: steel plate, four feet by eight. The plate has to be on hand before machining starts, but the plate does not occupy a machine. It is not work.

Step 10 is a Work Center position: CNC milling. This one is work. It has hours per unit, a setup time, and a station it belongs to. When the engine schedules the job, this is the position that competes for capacity on the mill, gets assigned to a shift and a machine instance, and shows up as load on the milling work center.

Step 30 is a Component position: a gearbox sub-assembly. The gearbox is something your plant builds, with its own routing. Because it is typed as a Component rather than a Material, the schedule knows that step 30 cannot run until the gearbox actually exists.

Now imagine the steel plate at step 5 had been typed as a Work Center by mistake. The engine would treat a sheet of steel as an operation, hand it hours, and book it against a station. Your milling work center would look busy doing nothing. That single wrong classification is enough to corrupt a capacity report, and nothing about the row would look obviously wrong at a glance.

How EDGEBIC Uses It

The item type is set on each routing position when you build the routing, and it drives three behaviors:

• Capacity claims. Only Work Center positions consume the finite hours of a station. Material and Component positions never inflate a work center's load, so utilization figures stay honest.
• Dependency handling. A Component position pulls a sub-assembly's own routing into the timing picture. The parent step waits on the sub-assembly rather than starting on machine availability alone.
• Reading the routing. Because the type is explicit, anyone opening a routing can see at once which lines are work and which lines are things, without inferring it from the name of the row.

The item type is a classification of the routing position. For the scheduling behavior of the material lines specifically, see what is a material step in a routing. For sub-assemblies, see what is a sub-assembly in manufacturing. To add a material line yourself, follow how to add a material step to a routing.