Manufacture stock for Raw materials/Parts base on "Free To Use" .

lns-romanb

Hi there,

I would like to share my use case and maybe a help of this community or/and developers to understand if there is any way to use correctly or adapt ATUM product suite for our use case.

Short story:
We would like to track our stock levels for Raw materials/Parts base on "Free To Use" value instead of "Total in Warehouse".

Long story:
We produce our products from parts and raw materials purchased from our suppliers and after manufacture we sell produced products to our market.

Example:

We create raw materials and parts. They will be used to make our final product. Let’s call them Part 1, Part 2 and Raw 1
We create in Woocommerce our final product - Product 1
And we attach BOMs as :
Product 1:
Part 1 - 1pc
Part 2 - 2pc
Raw 1 - 10ml

We create an PO (Purchase order) for these raw and parts.

Part 1 - 10pc
Part 2 - 10pc
Raw 1 - 100ml

As soon as we received our order and complete our PO:

Total in warehouse and Free To Use equals our PO.
```
Part 1 - 10pc
Part 2 - 10pc
Raw 1 - 100ml
```

Committed are zero 🙂

Our employee manufacture produce 3x (Product 1) with these parts and raw
So he used from raw and part stock:
Part 1 - 3pc
Part 2 - 6pc
Raw 1 - 30ml
so he increase stock value for "Product 1" to 3 but don't touch anything in Raw and Parts.

ATUM values will be:

Total in Warehouse:
	Part 1 - 10pc
	Part 2 - 10pc
	Raw 1 - 100ml

Free to use:
	Part 1 - 7pc
	Part 2 - 4pc
	Raw 1 - 70ml
	
Committed:
	Part 1 - 3pc 
	Part 2 - 6pc
	Raw 1 - 30ml

On action 5 we assume internally that we used stock for Raw and parts and increased product stock.

Then Total warehouse will be decreased only when we sell final product.

So our essential manufacture stock level is not "Total in warehouse" but "Free to use".

So we have 2 main issues are slow down our business in term of purchases from our suppliers and generate errors (as we have about 500 final products and 900 (raw + parts)):

Every time when we do an inventory we have to calculate "Committed" + our real manufacture stock and put it into Total in Warehouse. (like "Committed" + "Free To Use" = "Total in Warehouse")
Here ideally, would be to have a possibility to type into "Free to Use" that will do "Committed" + new "Free To Use" and put new "Total in Warehouse".
To create correctly our PO we also have review sort and resort our Raw mat to do a PO as we have to calculate Low Stock or Out of Stock base on Free To Use value ( as Total in Warehouse not reaching "Low Stock" we still have final products in stock)
In this case is not easy to trace with Low Stock even if put it higher as we produce base estimated demand that have "different seasons".
And Out Of Stock values just doesn't work for us in this case.

Ideally, we would like that "Low Stock" and "Out of Stock" value instead of checking "Total in Warehouse" can use "Free to Use".

We already tried to do custom exports using "Export Pro" but still lots of manual work to sort and resort this, then manually create PO from exported and reworked Excel sheets.
Also, recently we started to use "Purchase Orders Pro" and great product, but it is still difficult to create right PO for low stock products.

Personally, i can also build some logic in functions.php if there is action or filters that i can use for it, but at this point don't find a description what filters or actions i can use in ATUM.

Thanks a lot for your help and any ideas.

Forum_Admin

Hi lns-romanb ,

Thank you very much for your post.

I am surely able to help as the ATUM developers are at this very moment reworking the columns you mentioned.

However, the functions we are creating will be included in the upgraded version of Product Levels that will go up in price towards the end of the year (the current build is not complete and the price is introductory). One of the features already working a PRODUCE button that basically creates products from the BOM tree and deducts the tree according to the formulations of raw materials and product parts.

As mentioned we are to test all the additional features first. I expect the release late October.

Regarding your point 2, there will be a safety stock column that you can use to create PO / as well hoping to add it towards the end of this year.

In the coming years we are to build a brand new feature called Inventory Planner / that will help to put your order needs on automation.

Is there anything I have missed?

Pavel

lns-romanb

Thank you so much for your reply and explanations.
This sounds great and i understand the timeline and priorities.

So just to confirm and don't hesitate to correct me:

There will be a "Produce" button in products that will deduct "Total in Stock" value from "Raw" and "Part" products according BOM formulation.
This will allow to trace Manufacture stock using standard workflow. (Low stock and out of stock).
It looks exactly what we need 🙂
Do you have any additional info about "Safety Stock" or usage example? I am not sure to understand how it will work for point 2.

All of what you mention looks so energizing. Thanks for that.
If need some acceptance/beta/user testing on real data or some additional info about our usage, don't hesitate to ping me.

Forum_Admin

lns-romanb thank you very much for your reply.

The safety stock will be more like OPTIMAL stock amount that you can set per product or per any raw material or product part. It is a feature that will have a lot of side features included, but basically will tell you how much to order for you to have the optimal stock amount.

lns-romanb

Nice Thanks a lot!
to be tested.... 🙂

lns-romanb

Hi there,

do you have any progress on "OPTIMAL / Safety" stock amount and "Produce" button in products?
If need any early adopters, we are in 🙂
Thanks a lot,

Salva

Hi lns-romanb

The "Produce" button was already developed and will come in a future version of Product Levels.

Best Regards,
Salva

simonmaltby

I am desperately waiting for this too. Please get the Produce button launched ASAP.

It is so hard trying to manage stock levels as it is... Like the OP I manufacture from parts and need the stock level of the finished part separate from the component parts still in store.

Please get it live... it's been ages in waiting.

Forum_Admin

lns-romanb simonmaltby

My name is Pavel, the owner of ATUM.

Thank you very much for being part of our project. I need to apologise for the misleading messages you were getting from my team. Salva and I have misunderstood each other, and unfortunately, I only found out about this post.

The Produce Button was never agreed to get out at any specific time. It is a feature I have asked the guys to develop for my own company, which is funding the development.

It was planned to include it in the Product Levels addon, but it can only function with the Multi Inventory addon installed. The process creates a new inventory with a batch number.

I've asked my developers to re-test the feature and add functionality to make it work with Product Levels installed only under certain conditions.

Now that I know you guys are desperately waiting for the feature, I will push the release. Hopefully, we can make this for early January.

Hope this helps.

Pavel

lns-romanb

Thanks a lot @Salva ,
Produce button looks not included in 1.8.8. Any ETA?
Also any ETA for Safety" stock?

Thanks a lot.

Salva

Hi lns-romanb

The produce button will be released once we prepare the documentation, etc.
We don't have an ETA for the "Safety stock" yet, I'm sorry

lns-romanb

Hi @Salva ,
Any updates on ETA for "Produce" feature/button?

Thanks

lns-romanb

Hi Pavel,

Thank you for the update. I'm not entirely sure what was missed with Salva, but first "Forum_Admin" response was dated June 22, 2022.

the functions we are creating will be included in the upgraded version of Product Levels that will go up in price towards the end of the year (the current build is not complete and the price is introductory). One of the features already working a PRODUCE button that basically creates products from the BOM tree and deducts the tree according to the formulations of raw materials and product parts.
As mentioned we are to test all the additional features first. I expect the release late October.

Additionally, there were other features mentioned, such as "Safety Stock" or Inventory Planner, but I haven't heard anything about them since. It's been over a year now.

I understand your workflow with Batch/Lot and Multi Inventory. Due to the lack of information on the requirements for Multi Inventory about Produce button, we've been already using Multi Inventory in a completely different way (inventory per WareHouse). Is it possible for you to provide a switch that allows us to update specific inventory instead of creating a new one?
While I understand your approach to implementing this feature, I foresee potential issues on our end if we were to adopt this method. It will take some time for us to define our workflow using the batch/lot approach you describe. Additionally, I have concerns about the performance impact of creating a new inventory every time, especially considering we have 700 final products based on approximately 1000 raw/parts products.

That's why i also mentioned on 19 June 2023

If need any early adopters, we are in 🙂

Thanks,

Roman

Forum_Admin

Hi lns-romanb ,

Thank you very much for your reply. Wish we had more users like you.

Yes, I have commented in 2022, but plans changed then and there was "the" misunderstanding (most probably my fault).

Anyway, the produce button is being worked on as we speak to make it available for you all. It can already add/produce stock to an existing inventory.

Safety stock - we have not gone further to make this as there is a way to do this already (not called safety stock, but you can understand this as a workaround).
[https://stockmanagementlabs.crunch.help/en/atum-core/reserved-stock]
You can reserve any amount of stock and monitor it in Stock Central as reserved stock. When you need to release the stock, you simply do that with the inventory log. Hope this helps.

Inventory Planner - this feature I discontinued even though I really wanted to do this. The problem is that WooCommerce does not store any dated history of sales. So every time the planner wants to check and suggest, it will have to go through all sales history data one by one. With busy shops this becomes deadly for servers and performance.

Hope this helps.

Pavel

japiera

Hi @lns-romanb , @simonmaltby , and @Geusdiervoeding

This post is to inform you that we finally included the "Produce items" functionality in the last ATUM Product Levels version. You can read how it works here if you are still interested.

Best Regards,
José Andrés

lns-romanb

Thank you very much for this update. We are currently changing our process, and it looks really promising. We plan to go live with it this month.

One issue that stands out to us is the "Shortage" value. Since the Produce button currently does not allow production in negative values, can we disable the shortage calculation? The "Committed" value still makes sense. However, in scenarios where we enable the "Produce" button but do not use "BOM Stock Control," the "Shortage" value becomes irrelevant, also "Free to use" 🙂

Another aspect seems a bit strange.

If my recipe requires 8 BOM units per final product, and my BOM stock is exactly 8 units, I am able to produce more than one final product (though I appreciate the warning when setting it to more than 2 final products). However, if I have fewer than 8 units in BOM, I cannot produce any more products (the produce button is grayed out).

It would be beneficial to have a setting that either allows production to exceed the BOM units available in stock or restricts production to not exceed the BOM units (personally, I would prefer not allowing production to exceed what the BOM allows. In such cases, the user should be prompted to correct their BOM, serving as a direct warning that something is amiss with the stock).

Thank you very much for your assistance.

japiera

Hi lns-romanb ,

You're welcome.

We're aware of the irrelevance of the "Free to Use" and "Shortage" values in that cases. FYI, we plan to remove them where they are unnecessary in future versions. Anyway, thanks for pointing it out to us.

We'll also discuss what you say about whether to allow the production of more final products than can actually be produced.

Best Regards,
José Andrés