Last Updated: February 3, 2026
You’ve designed a new plastic product. Your engineering team has specified the exact resin blend, the molding parameters, the packaging requirements, and the labor steps needed to produce it. Now you need to translate all that technical knowledge into a format your ERP system can use to plan materials, schedule production, and calculate costs.
For many manufacturers, this translation process is painful. Bills of material become static documents in spreadsheets or PDFs, disconnected from actual production. When formulations change, multiple systems need manual updates. Cost calculations happen in separate tools. Production instructions live in three-ring binders on the shop floor.
But what if your bill of material was more than just a parts list? What if it was a dynamic, integrated framework that connected engineering specifications directly to material planning, production scheduling, cost accounting, and shop floor execution?
Acumatica’s manufacturing suite provides exactly this capability—a bill of material system sophisticated enough to handle complex plastics manufacturing while remaining flexible enough to adapt as your processes evolve.
Understanding BOM Structures in Acumatica
Acumatica organizes bills of material around operations with the actual work steps required to produce your product. This operation-centric approach mirrors how plastics manufacturing actually works: you don’t just assemble parts; you perform processes that transform materials.
For a molded plastic product, you might define two operations: molding and packaging. Each operation has its own materials, labor requirements, work centers, setup times, and run rates. This structure provides several advantages:
Materials are associated with the operation that consumes them: Resin and colorant are linked to the molding operation, while labels and pallets are linked to packaging. This association enables accurate material planning and cost tracking by operation.
Labor and machine time are specified per operation: The system knows exactly how long molding takes versus packaging, enabling realistic production scheduling and capacity planning.
Byproducts can be captured: If your molding process generates regrind that you’ll reuse, you can specify that as a negative material requirement, automatically adding it to inventory when production completes.
This operation-based structure supports both simple and complex manufacturing scenarios, scaling from single molding operations to coordinating multiple processes across different work centers using the bill of material framework.
Kitting vs. Full Manufacturing: Choosing the Right Approach
Not every assembly process requires full manufacturing capabilities. Acumatica offers both kitting and full manufacturing functionality, letting you choose the appropriate level of complexity for each product.
Kitting is ideal for simple assembly operations where you combine components without transformation. If you’re packaging multiple items together or performing light assembly without significant labor or machine time, kitting provides a streamlined approach. Components are allocated and deducted from inventory when the kit is assembled.
Full Manufacturing is appropriate when you’re transforming materials through work processes, tracking labor and machine time, managing multiple operations, or requiring detailed cost accounting. For plastics molding, full manufacturing is typically the right choice because you’re transforming raw resin into finished products.
The flexibility to use both approaches within the same system means you can apply the right tool to each situation. Your custom manufacturing processes can be used in full manufacturing while simple packaging operations use kitting.
Material Requirements and Backflushing
For each operation in your bill of material, you specify the materials required and how those materials are consumed. These quantities scale automatically if you’re producing 100 units instead of one, the system calculates total material requirements accordingly.
Acumatica offers two approaches to material consumption:
Backflushing: Materials are automatically deducted from inventory when the operation completes. This approach streamlines shop floor data entry operators simply report production quantity, and the system handles material transactions based on the bill of material. Backflushing works well for consistent processes where actual consumption matches planned consumption.
Manual Release: Operators explicitly release materials to production, often by scanning lot numbers or entering actual quantities. This approach provides more control and traceability, particularly important when you need to track specific resin lots through production or when actual consumption varies from planned amounts.
You can configure backflushing at the material line level, so you might backflush commodity resins while manually releasing expensive colorants where precise lot tracking matters.
Labor Tracking and Work Center Costing
Each operation in your bill of material specifies labor requirements and work center assignments. Work centers represent your production resources molding machines, packaging lines, finishing equipment and each work center has associated labor and overhead rates.
When you’re planning production, the system uses these rates along with setup time and run rate to calculate expected labor costs. If an operation requires one hour of setup and can produce one unit per hour, making a single unit costs significantly more than making 100 units because setup cost is spread across more pieces.
Labor can be tracked through multiple methods:
Standard Labor: The system uses rates defined in the work center, providing consistent costing without shop floor data collection.
Clock In/Out: Operators can clock into production orders through Acumatica’s built-in timekeeping, capturing actual labor hours that flow into cost accounting.
Manual Entry: Production supervisors can enter labor hours after the fact, useful for operations where real-time tracking isn’t practical.
The system supports operators working on multiple production orders simultaneously, automatically allocating labor across jobs based on time spent.
Byproducts and Scrap Management
Plastics manufacturing often generates materials that flow back into production. Regrind from runners and sprues, edge trim from thermoforming, or purge material from color changes, these byproducts have value and need to be tracked.
Acumatica handles byproducts by allowing negative material quantities on your bill of material. If your molding process produces a quarter pound of regrind per unit, you specify -0.25 pounds of regrind material on the operation. When production is complete, the system automatically adds the regrind quantity to inventory, making it available for reuse.
This automatic byproduct tracking ensures your inventory management system knows exactly how much regrind you’ve generated and where it’s available for use. The system also supports scrap tracking when materials are consumed but don’t result in finished products.
Excel Integration for BOM Management
Bills of material can contain dozens or hundreds of component lines. Acumatica supports exporting grid data to Excel, and many screens support import so teams can make updates in a familiar spreadsheet format and bring changes back in with validation.
You can export your current bill of material to Excel, make changes in the familiar spreadsheet environment, and import the updated data back into Acumatica. This capability is particularly valuable when copying and modifying BOMs, updating multiple lines simultaneously, performing bulk data entry, or sharing BOM data with engineering or purchasing teams.
The Excel workflow helps speed bulk updates while still enforcing required fields and business rules.
Documentation and Operating Procedures
Manufacturing isn’t just about materials and labor; it’s about knowledge. Acumatica lets you attach files and notes to bills of material at both the header and line level, centralizing your production documentation.
You might attach standard operating procedures, quality specifications, setup instructions, safety information, or photos and diagrams. These attachments are stored in the Acumatica database and accessible from anywhere in the planning office, the shop floor, and the quality lab. When an operator creates a production order, they can access the associated documentation directly from their workstation or mobile device.
Within operations, you can define specific steps that must be completed in sequence. These steps can print on production routers, ensuring operators follow the correct procedure every time.
Tool Tracking and Management
Many plastics processes rely on molds, dies, and specialized tooling. Acumatica can track tool-related details with notes, files, and usage history, and you can plan production around tool availability.
For manufacturers that need finite, constraint-based scheduling, Acumatica also offers Advanced Planning & Scheduling (APS) to support more detailed capacity planning.
Tools can be scheduled using finite scheduling capabilities, ensuring you plan production around tool availability. Like other Acumatica objects, tools support notes and files for maintaining complete documentation about each mold or die.
Cost Calculations and Analysis
Once you’ve defined your bill of material, Acumatica can calculate expected costs based on current material prices, labor rates, and overhead. You can run cost calculations for different quantities to understand how setup costs and volume impact unit costs.
Producing one unit might cost $25 because the one-hour setup cost is absorbed by a single piece. Producing 100 units reduces the cost to $7.85 per unit because setup is spread across more production. This cost visibility helps with quoting, pricing decisions, and production planning.
The system maintains both current and pending standard costs, with automated workflows to update costs and revalue inventory.
Engineering Change Control and Revisions
Products evolve. Material specifications change, processes improve, customer requirements shift. Acumatica’s engineering change control capability manages these changes while maintaining complete revision history.
You can create multiple BOM revisions for the same item, each with a revision identifier, effectivity dates, and the ability to maintain concurrent revisions. This revision control supports phased changes, location-specific BOMs, and process alternatives.
When you create a new revision by copying an existing BOM, you preserve all the setup work while enabling modifications. The revision remains in “hold” status until you’re ready to activate it, preventing accidental use of incomplete specifications.
Different manufacturing facilities often use different processes for the same product. Acumatica supports facility-specific BOMs through the revision system, maintaining separate BOM revisions for each warehouse or manufacturing site. This multi-site capability extends throughout Acumatica’s manufacturing functionality, coordinating production planning across your entire network.
Integration with Production Orders
The bill of material is the foundation, but production orders are where manufacturing happens. When you create a production order from a BOM, Acumatica copies all the material requirements, operations, labor specifications, and tool requirements into the production order.
Once in the production order, these specifications can be modified as needed for substitute materials, adjust quantities, or change operations to reflect actual production conditions. The production order maintains the link back to the source BOM while allowing the flexibility needed on the shop floor.
This integration ensures your production planning and execution always starts from current, approved specifications while accommodating the reality that manufacturing sometimes requires adjustments.
Why Accurate BOMs Matter
Bills of material aren’t just engineering documents they’re the foundation of your entire manufacturing operation. Accurate BOMs drive material planning through MRP calculations, production scheduling through operation times and work center assignments, cost accounting through labor rates and overhead allocations, and quality control through specifications and procedures.
When BOMs are incomplete or inaccurate, every downstream process suffers. Customizable BOM management in Acumatica ensures you can capture exactly the information your business needs while maintaining the data quality that drives operational excellence.
Taking the Next Step
Building effective bills of material requires understanding both your manufacturing processes and your ERP system’s capabilities. The investment in creating detailed, accurate BOMs pays dividends through improved planning, better cost visibility, and more consistent production.
Parallel Solutions specializes in helping plastics manufacturers implement Acumatica’s manufacturing suite. We understand the unique requirements of molding operations from managing multiple resin grades and colorants to tracking molds and tooling to calculating accurate costs that account for scrap and regrind.
Ready to see how Acumatica’s bill of material functionality can transform your manufacturing planning? Let’s start with a conversation about your specific products and processes.