Introduction to Components

Components can be really useful for situations where an in-process material is created as a batch before being used up between a number of products. A Component is a unique type of product that, when manufactured, adds to its own inventory rather than contributing to the stock of a finished product intended for sale.

We'll Cover:

This tutorial should take approximately 20 minutes to complete.

What are Components?

A component (or sub-assembly) creates stock that can be used along with materials or other components to create a finished product. Components can be really useful for situations where a material is created as a batch before being used up between a number of products.


When should you use Components?

If you create a material as a sub-process and later use this new material in more than one product, then you should definitely consider creating a component to handle this.


A very simple example is "Buttercream": essentially, butter, sugar, and milk are blended together to produce a new ingredient used as a filling or icing on cakes. Typically, to save time, a baker would produce a batch of Buttercream to be used for all cakes baked that day, so this fits the criteria for a component.


Creating the Buttercream as a component has two main advantages:

1. For each cake, only the Buttercream amount must be added to the product recipe. Otherwise, the exact amount of Butter and Sugar used in the buttercream would need to be calculated and added separately to each recipe.


2. The extra hidden labor cost of producing the component can be automatically factored into your pricing and labor costs.


How to Create a Component

Adding components is very similar to adding a product. This is configured on the Add Component page, so let's go there now.

You must set the unit of measurement of the component you will be producing. For our buttercream example, we will set this to "gram."

Once you are happy with the information you have added, click the button to submit the details. Once saved, you'll be taken to your component page.

You'll notice that the page is quite similar to your materials, as you can also keep track of Lots and perform Stocktakes for your components.

The Purchases tab is not available here because a component can not be purchased - it is only ever manufactured via the component. You'll also see that instead of unit cost, we have Manufacture Cost displayed: this will be 0.00 as we haven't told the system about what goes in the component yet.


Manufacturing Components

We'll now add a recipe for the component. This process is identical to the one you use to create a regular product, so we'll skip through this quickly.

Let's say that we produce 500 grams of buttercream per batch. We'll enter 500 in the Manufacture Batch Quantity and 15 minutes in the Estimated Batch Manufacture Time. We'll then add the butter, sugar, and milk as materials and click the button.

We can now see our complete recipe with the total manufacture cost. Now, let's make some Buttercream and see what happens!

Click the Manufactures tab, then click the Add Manufacture button. After the form loads, click the Save Manufacture button; we'll leave everything as the default for this manufacture.

If you navigate to your Component, you'll see we have 500 ounces in stock. The manufacturer has increased your stock of the component on hand and decreased your stock of the materials in your recipe.


Using Components in Product Recipes

Now that we have made some buttercream, let's use some of it in another product.

Create a new Product called "Buttercream Cake." Add the buttercream component and a couple of other regular materials to the recipe and then save. Looking at the recipe list on the cake product's page, you should be able to see that the proportioned materials AND labor costs for the buttercream are displayed and tallied as part of your total manufacturing cost.


Finally, adding a Manufacture for your Buttercream Cake will decrease your stock on hand of the component in exactly the same way as all other materials used in the recipe.

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