Manufacturing enables companies that produce their own products on production lines and get external companies to do some production. Forecasting is based on sales, it can see manufacturing batches that are expected to be completed, purchase orders that are expected to be received and plans the raw ingredients required. The Article has the Bill of Materials (BOM), a link to the type of production room and the related QA tests to complete before, during and after production. The Plan/Review Order is where you create the planned batches. The Manufacturing Dashboard provides a view into all the planned jobs for each manufacturing room and makes it easy to change the order of jobs and the type of clean required between products.
When planning jobs you can manipulate the batch sizes and ingredients (by looking for equivalent items) and scale to use full bags of ingredients until you decide what you want to produce. You then mark the job as planned. The job start will float in the dashboard as other jobs are completed early or late so the expected start/end times update as work progresses. Production jobs are picked and the materials checked prior to production starting. You can define detailed production QA Tests and group them into QA Test Groups to be used during production and also during cleans. Once production is completed you enter the quanties of completed materials, returns, waste and time in the room and the system will create the new average cost using all the costs for the batch including overheads. If you have linked production batches (for example bag printing prior to production) the system will create a linked job for the relevant production centre which will scale as you adjust the quantity in planning. A linked job is created for any JIT item on the BOM that is manufactured and is used to autocreate the jobs required on labelling machines for example.