@Vernon Anderson There was some discussion to develop Co-product functionality in IFS some time back. But I don’t think it was implemented due to not getting much traction to that requirement from the industry. 

What is the issue you find substitute products as an alternative solution? 

@Vernon Anderson In 23R1 it is possible to create a standalone Disassembly type shop order. The shop order part is automatically added as a material line to be consumed from stock (like for a repair shop order), and you will get Disassembly Components to receive according to the disassembly BOM. 

Co-Products are also on the roadmap. it would be highly valuable to hear your requirements within this area. I.e., what is that you cannot currently achieve using Substitute Parts / By-Products?

@Björn Hultgren I believe Co-Products would be beneficial to my company as well. As an example, we have a fixture that currently results in 3 Finished Good products being produced with one cycle. As of now, each part is setup with a Routing and Structure. Three unique SOs are created and released for production. You cannot produce one part without producing the other two. By-Product will not work, as we need to have a Control Plan for each PN for QA checks, as well as travelers for the bins the stock is stored in. We have to set the Setup and Labor crew sizes to 1, and the operator clocks into all three SOs. This solution is not ideal, as the costs are not truly correct on the three PNs, and we cannot set the crew sizes to .33, as that would skew labor planning. 

The idea of Co-Products seems as though it would address this issue and I do not think Substitute Part/ By-Products would. 

Thanks for the clarification @cjohnson . I understand the requirements around the control plan and the need for a traveler. I would suggest you create a request for this any any additional requirements in addition to what is currently supported with by-products from the Idea section of this community. https://community.ifs.com/ideas

you are mentioning you now use 3 separate shop orders and clock time on the simultaneously. That sounds like a good workaround and even operation blocks can be used to group these together. However what is the problem with defining the operations with a crew size 0f 0.33 in the routing to indicate an operation will run 3 operations simultaneously? In what way would that skew labor planning?

@Björn Hultgren We have a labor planning tool outside of IFS that has standard hours loaded based on the Routings. So, our Op/Planning group will review the open SO/SORs and the hour load by work center. When we attempted to set .33 for a crew size, they realized it was understating the actual labor needed. As an example, when looking out over a week on that WC, it is calling for 84 labor hours, with the WC running 140 machine hours. That does not match the actual reality. We were able to work around this by setting the crew sizes to 1, taking the setup hours 1/3, and adjusting the machine/labor factor to 3x the actual run. That corrected our labor planning, and the cost was close. Not ideal, but this does allow us to correctly plan labor for the WC. I had been looking at operation blocks, and was thinking about testing that to group them. Thank you!