Transactional Macros

The SAS macros described in this section perform specialized transactions for reducing the clerical time required to maintain the bills of material. These macros update Indented BOM data sets and are not concerned with the original Part Master and Product Structure data sets. Some companies use these two data sets to create an Indented BOM data set. Thereafter, they use, maintain, or update only the Indented BOM data set without referring again to the Part Master and Product Structure data sets.

The transactional macros enable you to make changes to the indented bill of material, such as replacing an item with another one, deleting an item, and so on. These macros should be used carefully. Used correctly, they enable you to avoid some clerical work and can be helpful in certain situations. However, if the macros are used incorrectly, it may take hours to reconstruct what was changed automatically in a matter of seconds (Landvater and Gray 1989).

The macros contained in this section are as follows:

The copy-and-paste transaction copies a bill of material for a given item and attaches it to another parent item. This is normally followed by some transactions to change a few of the components in the copied bill of material. The multiple-delete transaction removes the entire bill of material for a given item in all its appearances. This transaction is used most often when an item is obsolete. The multiple-replace transaction searches the entire data set and replaces the bill of material for a given item with another in all its uses. This transaction is used when one item is replacing another in every bill of material where the original item is used (Landvater and Gray 1989). The same-as-except transaction creates a new bill of material that is a clone of an old one, and then replaces one item with another in all its appearances in the newly created bill.