Getting Raw materials to reduce by a decimal quantity

alexharmer

Hi there,

I am looking to implement ATUM with a few of the premium plugins (multi inventory and product levels) - I'm currently testing on your demo site and having a few issues probably with my configuration of it.

Basically our business is a small-medium food manufacturer - we were considering using unleased software (https://www.unleashedsoftware.com/industry/food-manufacturing-software) but I am hoping to be able to use ATUM instead as I prefer a solution running on our own wordpress/woocommerce and your offering looks really promising.

The issue I am having is with decimal reducions for raw materials.

Scenario is:

A product we produce (Product A) has a bill of materials (certain measurements of ingredients and then packaging)

I have entered the bill of materials for this product, to make 1 unit of the finished product it would use for example 0.1 units of Raw Material 1.

The problem I am having is that if I produced 10 units of product A, it seems to reduce the associated Raw material 1 correctly by 1 full unit (0.1 * 10 = 1).

However, if I just produced 1 unit of product A, stock central will correctly say 0.1 units of raw material 1 are committed (in the committed column).... BUT - upon selling this product and woocommerce reducing its stock level, raw material 1 still has 1 unit of stock left (but it should now only have 0.9 units of stock left as 0.1 has been consumed). The commited column correctly goes back to 0 in this situation.

Could you please guide me if I am missing something or have a setting in incorrectly (perhaps how decimals are being rendered in the stock available columns + product level views?)

I've tried many of the decimal and genral settings but cannot seem to get it working as desired.

Hopefully a simple fix for something I've missed as I am convinced outside of this issue that the plugin will be suitable for my business and we can use it for the long term.

Thanks!

P.S. - if you have any other info on how other food manufacturers configure/use the plugin that would be great as well.

alexharmer

Just an update

I read some of your other presales replies and I think I know the issue, but could still use some advice. (read this - https://forum.stockmanagementlabs.com/d/2050-unable-to-check-if-bom-will-work-form-me/5)

Basically we measure things by weight - in our case grams.

I can enter our raw materials in their smallest unit form (grams), and this will remove the need to have stock reduced by decimals.

I am a bit confused how this works with the purchase order functionality then though.

For example, raw material 1 we purchase from our supplier in 10kg tubs.

But given that my raw material is now measured in grams, if I generate a purchase order it will no longer match how the suppliers lists their product - it would send them a purchase order for 10000 units (grams).

Is there some way to have a separate linked product in woocommerce for the purposed of ordering from our suppliers, but which then correctly updates the raw materials we actually put in our finished product BOM?

alexharmer

One final linked question

Is there any functionality to create a production order in ATUM?

Basically, production occurs a few times a week and we would decide what should be produced.

I thought the purchase order functionality could serve this purpose, as I can select our own company as the supplier and then add the required finished products to be produced.

This almost works, except when the purchase order is moved to recieved, it correct increases the finished goods inventory, but incorrectly also increases the BOM inventory rather than comitting it.

I can manually go into a finished product and add inventory which will then correctly commit the BOM, but this seems error prone and doesn't create any documentation or record/order that can be passed on to the production team to reference to produce the order.

Could you let me know if I am missing something, or if a variant of purchase orders can be used to achieve this 'production order' type functionality going forward?

Thanks!

AndreaRebel

Hi alexharmer

Regarding this:

I'm sorry but this is not possible. To achieve this you will need custom development, but as we don't offer this service you will need to hire a developer.

Regarding your last question, this feature will be available in our premium add-on ATUM Purchase Orders Premium, which is in active development but we still don't have an ETA.

Best Regards,

Andrea.

alexharmer

AndreaRebel

Hi Andrea,

Thanks for the information.

AndreaRebel

Thanks for the response and good to know that the premium purchase order functionality will add the ability to create production orders that commit bill of materials.

With the ordering from suppliers issue - I was just thinking - wouldn't the WooCommerce product buldes plugin fix this issue for me?

With product bundles I could create a supplier product listing, and then add the product in its correct quantity in grams as the bundled product.

Provided Atum still correctly updates the bundled product inventory it should work fine I think...

I am unable to install the product bundles extension on the Atum test site but perhaps you can check this for me?

This info might solve the problem for many of your other customers too...

Alex

Salva

Hi alexharmer

Is there any functionality to create a production order in ATUM?

The upcoming Purchase Orders premium add-on will have a lot of new and useful functionalities but, FYI, we are also working on 2 other add-ons (Manufacturing Orders and Manufacturing Planning) that should fit perfectly within your business logic 😉
These 2 new add-ons will come next year.

I am unable to install the product bundles extension on the Atum test site but perhaps you can check this for me?

ATUM is fully compatible with the WooCommerce Product Bundles (the official one) but we don't know if what you are proposing can work or not. And, I'm sorry but you should test it by yourself as this test involves 3rd party plugins that are out of the scope of our support service. I hope you understand this.

Best Regards,
Salva.

alexharmer

Salva

Hi Salva,

Thanks for the extra information.

That is great to hear you wil be developing some manufacturing modules! I'll be very interested in deploying these when available so I'll keep my fingers crossed they are developed quickly.

If you have any info on the proposed features of this module I'd love to see them as well.

Okay noted with product bundles - I have that plugin on my production site so can test with ATUM and let you know how it goes for the purchase order issue.

Thanks

Salva

Hi alexharmer

These are some of the planned features for Manufacturing Orders:

Manufacturing Order and its need within production.
Types of Manufacturing Orders
Generating Manufacturing Order + Requisition
The Manufacturing Order Screen
The Manufacturing Instruction Settings and List
The MO automatic numbering
Documents Created/Printed For Production Team
Manufacturing Order Statuses
Colour Coding Manufacturing Orders
Notifications within the MO List and the Manufacturing Menu
Batch Numbers and Expiry Dates
Completing/Closing a Manufacturing Order
Warehouse Cooperation
Documents Created/Printed for Warehouse Team
Service/Repair Manufacturing Orders
Manufacturing Order List
Search Capabilities Within Manufacturing Orders
List Page for All Documents
Search Capabilities within the Page of All documents List

And a lot more 😉

Best Regards,
Salva.