How to Complete an Assembly Order in Luminous

What an assembly order is

This is going to be a quick tutorial on how to complete an assembly order. Backing up for a moment: an assembly order is an action you take in Luminous to turn raw components into a finished product.

Create a bill of materials

To prepare, you'll want to create a bill of materials. Under Inventory Admin, go to Bills of Materials. You can see all of your existing BOMs, and you can also create a new one. I'm going to create a new bill of materials and call it BOM 1. Typically, I like to name the bill of materials after the finished product, like "chocolate chip cookie," so it's easy to track in Luminous.

I'll add a couple of rows and say this bill of materials requires cocoa and flour. You can also add notes or additional instructions for each line item, and update the quantities or the unit of measure. For instance, if you purchase something in kilos but assemble it by the gram, that's something you might use. Once the bill of materials is set up, I'll save it.

Attach the BOM to the finished good

Now, to prepare for the assembly order, I'll go into the finished goods SKU and attach that bill of materials. You can see I already have one here, but you can attach multiple. I'll search up BOM 1, click Done, and now it's attached.

The Assembly Orders page

That lets me go to Inventory, then Assembly Orders, also known as production orders or work orders. Here I can see all of my open assembly orders: ones that are issued, pending or in draft status, basically any that haven't been marked complete yet. I can edit existing open assembly orders, download or export them, or delete them if needed. From this view, you can also change the columns, like adding start and end times or any other columns that are relevant to you.

Assembly vs. disassembly orders

In the top right, there are options to create an assembly order or a disassembly order. Like I mentioned, an assembly order takes a group of components and produces one finished product. A disassembly order starts with one product, which then gets broken out into other products. The preparation is the same for both.

Create the assembly order

I'm going to click Create Assembly Order and search for the SKU with the associated bill of materials, this 10-foot rod. I'll indicate that I'm using BOM 1, and you can see the components that go into this finished goods SKU at the bottom: our cocoa and our flour.

A couple of things to note. In the top right of this screen is the destination, which is where the finished good will end up once it's produced. You can change the warehouse group, the warehouse or the location. Also, if lot tracking is turned on for this finished product, there's another field that lets you choose or create a lot number for it.

Quantities, yield and component sources

Moving on to actually performing the assembly order, I'll say I'm planning to produce 10 of these finished products, and it automatically updates the predicted amounts and the actuals. If you're tracking spoilage or yield, you can also enter the actual amount of each component that was used. That helps you use reports in Luminous to track yield and understand what's happening with your assemblies.

You can also choose where you're pulling these components from. For example, if you need to change the lot number of the components, or change the location you're pulling them from, you can do that here.

Add extra costs

One last piece: you can add extra costs to the assembly order. You can add different rows, and the most common is probably a labor fee, or an outsourcing cost you need to log. Adding these costs gives you a better grasp of the true cost of the finished product.

Complete the order

Up here you can see the different statuses. I'll mark this one as complete. When I hit Save, the component inventory is deducted and inventory is added for the finished product. And that's about it on assembly orders. Thanks.