Like all the other modules, I think manufacturing is really going to make life so much easier for people. Though, at the current stage it is only doing so for companies where a number of inventory items are being utilized to produce a single finished item.
It would be great if the manufacturing module was able to deal with a single inventory item (raw material) being utilized to produce multiple inventory items (finished goods).
Here is what I had in mind;
I understand that the problem would be the ability to determine the associated cost of each finished item from the initial cost of the raw material. To solve that, I suggest the ‘relative unit’ entry. Essentially, it will help create a costing spread in relation to a common unit of measurement. In absence of a common unit of measurement amongst the finished goods, you could even enter straight up percentage of the cost distribution.
Here is how the background working would be like;
In this case, I am using KGs as my relative unit since all the finished goods are measured in KGs in my company.
This won’t work if bill of materials consists of more than one item. You only use one item “Wheat” so you can get away with one column of “Relative Unit(s)”. For each item in bill of materials you would need new column in finished item(s) section and that would get quickly out of hand.
There will be other solution.
In future, you will be able to “memorize” bill of materials which will then allow you to select memorized bill of materials per each finished item. This will allow you to have multiple finished items within single manufacturing order.
A temporary solution is available to this problem (until you implement the long term fix).
If the manufacturing module would only be made to accept negative input values to do the exact opposite of what it is programmed to do.
This was the number of raw material items would not be more than one because the raw material figures would go in the single finished item field as a negative number (as to decrease the inventory figure as oppose to increasing it)
And similarly, the bill of materials numbers would also be negative as to increase the inventory numbers rather than decreasing them since they would actually be the finished items.
I know this isnt perfect, but its a possible temp fix…