Hey Joe

We seem to be in the same boat and are also missing the ability to easily specify substitute products in a BOM. Variants doesn't solve a thing here, because that's just an abstraction that creates more products and also forces me to choose one of those products that I want to manufacture. That's great for when you want to actually differentiate during manufacturing, but it doesn't help you when you want to "not care" about a certain component. The "kit" concept also doesn't help as far as I can tell, because that's just a way to explode a BOM into another BOM.

What is missing is really on the BOM line level as far as I can tell: there is always a link to a single product for every BOM line in Odoo's model. There is simply no way to say that multiple products are allowed or that all child products under a product template are allowed (and I have use cases for both those possible 'solutions' to be honest, not just one or the other). One way to go about it is to change the BOM lines ad-hoc when you create the manufacturing order, but even in this case, you are still force to make a choice for a component when you simply want to, again, "not care".

Anyway, besides doing custom development on this, I have not found a suitable workaround for this so far. I'm also hesitant to do custom development on this, because I'm afraid that's gonna be a maintenance nightmare with every upgrade. I've flagged this upstream last year at Odoo Experience to the Odoo manufacturing team that it's a shortcoming for us at least, no clue if they're inclined to improve this at some point. I sure hope so. I know they confirmed we weren't the only ones struggling with this.

Kind regards
Simon

Rivet is a product with a Manufacturer attribute and two Variants - Standard and Boeing

You end up with two products, with two SKU's, that can have two separate Vendors

They are tracked independently in Inventory

Create a SINGLE kit Bill of Materials for Widget that has two components

• the first one, Rivet from Boeing, is consumed when the "Boeing" variant of the Widget is required
• the second, Rivet from Aviation Supplier, is consumed when the "Standard" variant of the Widget is required

Depending on which Variant of Widget is needed Odoo will consume ONLY the appropriate raw material

Widget can also be a raw material in other Bill of Materials, as long as the parent products also have the same variant setup

This should be possible to manage with Variants in Odoo.  

In sales configuration, activate Variants.  Then create the Attribute, and the possible attributes values. 

Variant might be Fasteners type. Values like Type A and Type B.  My testcase looks like this:

In the product you enter the variant and the attributes:

If you go to menu Products, you find product variants:

You create one BOM for the base product. In that BOM you specify which component is to be used by which variant. If you don't specify a variant for a component, it will be used for all variants.

You Manufacture variants.   And after manufacturing each variant got their own SKU:

Read more about variants:

https://www.odoo.com/documentation/saas-17.2/applications/sales/sales/products_prices/products/variants.html