Production overview
In 1C:Drive, production is a broad term covering several types of manufacturing processes that involve creation of finished products from components:
- Assembly. This is the most basic production process. It consists of simply arranging components together without processing them in any way.
Example: assembling a PC from a CPU, motherboard, hard disk, and power supply unit. - Production. This involves processing and combining the components in a sequence of technological operations.
Production is much more labor- and resource-intensive than assembly. Production process often consists of multiple stages.
Example: production of a glass table with metal legs may involve cutting and painting the legs, tempering and cutting the glass, welding, and bolting. - Disassembly. This process is the exact opposite of assembly—breaking a finished product into a set of components.
Example: disassembling a defective stool into a seat and 4 legs.
Production processes follow one of the two common strategies (or, sometimes, a mix of both):
- Make-to-order. Manufacturing finished products to fulfill a specific incoming order—most commonly, a sales order from a customer. You start production as soon as you receive the order, and ship the finished products directly to the customer.
This ensures traceability of the internal document chain describing fulfillment of the customer order.
To learn more, see Make-to-order process and Multioperation make-to-order process.
- Make-to-stock. Manufacturing finished products to replenish your warehouse stock, not to fulfill a specific order.
This strategy is more flexible than make-to-order but offers less traceability.
The common use cases of make-to-stock strategy are:
- Batch processing of customer orders. When you receive multiple sales orders from one or several customers, you can choose to manufacture a single large batch of products instead of processing each order separately. The finished products are then transferred to your warehouse, so that each order can be fulfilled from the stock at a later time.
In 1C:Drive, batch order processing is commonly performed using the Demand planning tool, but can also be done manually.
- Stock replenishment. A company may have a variety of stock replenishment rules, such as keeping the warehouse inventory level above a certain minimum. Manufacturing products to satisfy these rules is also considered as make-to-stock.
In 1C:Drive, stock replenishment is commonly performed using the Demand planning tool.
- Manufacturing for future demand. Sometimes, you can estimate the quantity of products the customers are likely to demand in a future period of time. In this case, you manufacture the products in advance and put them in stock until the customers actually demand them.
In 1C:Drive, this is commonly performed using the Demand forecasting tool, but can also be done manually.
- Batch processing of customer orders. When you receive multiple sales orders from one or several customers, you can choose to manufacture a single large batch of products instead of processing each order separately. The finished products are then transferred to your warehouse, so that each order can be fulfilled from the stock at a later time.