When creating a new assembly you'll notice that there's two 'Types' of assembly - 'ASSY' and 'CSAS'. If your products/assemblies are simple single level assemblies then just set them as 'Assy' and you can ignore this section of the user guide.

If your products are multi-level (sub assemblies within assemblies etc) then 'CSAS' assemblies may be of use to you. The Type of assembly influences the way an assembly is displayed in a multi-level Bill of Materials and how it is processed when you take the necessary components from your inventory to build the assembly.

In this image below you see our Multi-Level BOM.

In the above image you can see that item 4 is an assembly. Items 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 are shown indented as level 2 indicating that they are contained inside item 4.

Items 10, 15 and 19 are also assemblies.

If you were using this BOM to issue materials for the work order then MiniMRP would issue all components down through all levels of the BOM and the OnHand quantities of all of the components, NOT the assemblies, would be reduced/taken out of your inventory.

That might not be the behavior you want. Perhaps some types of Sub Assembly are always built prior to requirement so always exist in your inventory as ready-built sub assemblies. You wouldn't want MiniMRP to issue the components again - you'd want to issue the pre-assembled sub assemblies.

See on the next page how we use the assembly type 'CSAS'.