About Make/Buy

The act of choosing between manufacturing a product in-house or purchasing it from an external supplier is called the make-or-buy decision.

See Also
About Manufacturing Responsibility
Changing Manufacturing Responsibility
Affected Part Revisions
Adding Parts to an MCO
About Part Bill of Materials - MBOM Plant-Specific View

When a part is created, a value is set for Design Purchase, on which Make/Buy is dependent.

  • If the Design Purchase attribute is set to "Design," the part's Make/Buy attribute is initially set to Make, but can be changed to "Buy."
  • If the Design Purchase attribute is set to "Purchase," the part's Make/Buy attribute is initially set to Buy and cannot be changed, even for subsequent revisions of the part. If it has to be changed, a new part number must be created.

In a make-or-buy decision, the two most important factors to consider are cost and availability of production capacity. An enterprise may decide to purchase the product rather than producing it, if is cheaper to buy than make, or if it does not have sufficient production capacity to produce it in-house.

The make-or-buy decision on the part is plant-specific for an assembly. One plant could make it and another could buy it from an external vendor. There can be cases where a Plant-A can buy from Plant-B.

From edit mode on the manufacturing responsibility page, you can propose the Make/Buy value for each plant. Note: This is only a proposal to set the right value of Make/Buy when the MCO is generated. The actual decision of Make/Buy value for a plant lies in the hands of Manufacturing Engineers, to be decided at the MCO level.

Make/Buy is shown in multiple places:

  • Plant Preferences and MBOM Plant-Specific views. Shows the Make/Buy value for the selected plant. This value is not editable.
  • Manufacturing Responsibility page of a part. Once the MECO is released, this value is not editable. However, an MCO can modify this as part of the MCO process and that change will be reflected here.
  • Part Properties page. The value is editable for parts in the Create state.
  • Affected Part Revisions page. You can edit the Make/Buy attribute for MCOs in the Create state.