How Phantom Assemblies Are Used in Supply Chain Planning

A phantom assembly, also known as phantom bill, is a nonstocked assembly that lets you group materials required to produce a subassembly. When you create a bill of material for a parent item, you can specify a component as a phantom.

One bill of material can represent a phantom subassembly for one parent item, and a stocked subassembly for another parent item. A phantom bill of material enables you to manufacture and stock the assembly when necessary. For example, you can use phantoms to build and stock occasional spares for field service requirements. The planning process explodes through a phantom subassembly to the components.

Settings That Affect Phantom Assembly

The planning process ignores phantom assembly routing when you define a job or repetitive schedule. To avoid any additional lead time offset for components, you set the lead time of the phantom to zero.

How Phantoms Are Used in Planning

When model bills or option class bills are components to another bill of material, the component supply type is a phantom. Instead of passing the parent's planned orders to the phantom, netting the phantom, and passing requirements to the phantom's components, the planning process blows through the phantom to create component planned orders. For the organization parameter, you have only the Material Only option for Phantom Operation Sequence Inheritance. The planning process ignores order modifiers for items that have a phantom supply type. The planning process plans the phantom subassembly using the lot-for-lot lot-sizing technique.

Typically, phantom assemblies act as normal assemblies when they represent a top-level assembly, such as when you master schedule them or manufacture them using a discrete job. As a subassembly, however, they lose their identity as distinct assemblies and are a collection of their components. The components of the phantom subassembly are included on the job and in the planned supplies, but not the phantom itself. Using the bill of material to determine phantoms, has two advantages: it allows for more flexibility (because a component can be a phantom in one bill and not another), and treatment of phantoms in the planning process is consistent with Oracle WIP.