I have a customer who want's to implement a particular method for setting up it's operation costs: Since the customer has about 10 lines of business, he want's to have operation rates by lines of business. So, operation A would have other cost when used in a routing of an item of business line 1 than when used in a routing of line of business 2.

The business lines map to to the baan item groups.

There are about ten business lines and about 70 different operations, which all should have there seperate costs; so we are talking about 700 different records.

We cannot use the operation surcharges by item group, since then we would need to have a seperate cost price component for each operation, which would make the integration tables explode.

The only thing I can think of right now is setting up different operation codes for each line of business (Drilling at Machine A-Line of Business 1, Drilling at Machine B-Line of Business 2...), and use those codes in the rountings with respect to the item group (line of business) the item belongs to. But then we need 700 operation codes, 700 operation rate codes and so on, which really get's messy and hard to explain to the end users.

Has anyone already had a similar problem or a better way to solve this issue?

Uli

I think the requirement needs to be looked at. A task performed by a person will cost the company the same no matter what product line you are looking at.
It seems that your customer is trying to solve a problem they have and came up with this solution. It might be better to look at the reason for this solution. What are they trying to achive by this?