The recipe is the foundation

A recipe describes which materials and operations produce an item. That sounds simple until the variants appear: the same product in different packaging, with a substitute material during shortages, in another size.

This is where standard systems start to stumble. If your product is configured at order time rather than picked from a list, the recipe has to be dynamic — and that is rarely a standard capability.

The job card tracks reality

The job card travels with the batch through the shop floor and records what actually happened: which operation, on which machine, by whom, how long, how much scrap.

The gap between standard and actual consumption is the most useful information in a manufacturing ERP. It shows where material is lost, which operation runs longer than planned, and which product does not in fact carry the margin you attribute to it.

Planning is bounded by capacity

In trade, planning comes down to stock and lead time. In manufacturing it also comes down to capacity: a machine does one thing at a time, and people with a given qualification are countable.

So a production plan is not a list of orders by due date but a sequence that accounts for what can run in parallel and what cannot. Systems without capacity planning produce elegant plans the shop floor cannot execute.

Product cost stops being a guess

When recipes, job cards and the warehouse work in one system, product cost is calculated from real data: materials consumed at current prices, plus recorded hours, plus allocated overhead.

Many manufacturers discover exactly here that some of their products sell below cost — not because someone miscalculated, but because nobody was calculating with real numbers.

Where to start

Not with planning, however attractive it looks. With job cards — they produce the data without which planning is fiction.

We showed what this looks like in practice in the job card digitalization example, and the service itself on the ERP systems page.

Frequently asked questions