I'm the IT guy but I'm trying to help our production and cost accounting people figure out a best practice for setting up manufacturing projects (PCS) in Baan 5c. We are a heavy industry company making highly engineered railroad maintenance equipment.

Here's the conflict: Accounting wants actual costs (or variances) for production orders for what we call machine projects (major machines built for our railroad customers). To do this, we create a manufacturing project and create customized items in the project.

Production wants to minimize the amount of customized items in a project as - once the item is customized, the bill of material must be maintained separately from that of the standard version of the same item. As anyone in a highly-engineered industry probably knows, engineering changes keep coming up to the point we ship the item. The fewer instances of an item exist, the less maintenance we need to do to keep the bills of material up-to-date.

So, accounting does not trust the standard costs and wants to customize while production wants to minimize bill of material maintenance by using as few customized items as possible.

Now the question, does anyone know if we can use standard items in a manufacturing project and either a) capture the actual costs of production of the standard item or failing that b) have the variances of the production of the actual cost posted to the project?