1) Start with part numbers.
2) bills of material
3) routings
 
and off you go
 
What kind of manufacturing do you do ?
 
 
JW

Working with a good outside vendor to get things started up corectly is well worth it.
 
otherwise you could end up messing things up and its way more expensive to fix.
 
I recomend a training session and have someone look over the design of what you want to do.
 
Design <-  make a plan 1st
take time to testdrive it on the system
refine it
Go for it
 
JW

RobC,
 
A word of caution as it sounds like you work with sheet material. DBA, and quite a few other systems for that matter, have some very definite limitations and frustrations for environments that work with x/y dimension sheet material. Be sure you are aware of the limitations BEFORE you start, so it does not come up as a huge roadblock/source of discontent.