Creating structures from templates overview

You can create a product structure from a product template, a plant structure from a plant template, and process structure from a process template. You may choose to define a generic product structure that does not represent an actual manufactured product because it contains generic placeholders in place of variable parts. These placeholders are identified by absolute occurrences that are populated when an actual product structure is created from the template.

If you create a generic manufacturing process structure from the generic product structure, the occurrences in the generic product structure are consumed in the generic process structure.

In a template process, although no real parts are consumed in the operations that comprise the generic process, each consumed item has an identity. This identity of the item in the process structure is the same as it is in the product structure. Consequently, if you use this process structure as a template for the creation of a new process structure for manufacturing a product that maps exactly to the generic product structure, the product and process share the same absolute occurrences. The new process that you create from the template consumes the parts from the real product structure with the same absolute occurrences.

Similarly, if you define a mapping between the plant structure referenced by the template and the actual plant structure, generic work areas are substituted with specific absolute occurrences.

Related Topics

• About cloning structures

• Creating structures from templates