Production
Planning production
How to check whether your stock covers several batches before you start them, build a shopping list, and create the batches from the plan.
Plan production answers one question before a production day: do you have enough to make everything you're planning? Choose the products and how many batches of each, and Crown shows what every ingredient needs, what you have, what's short, and what to order from whom. Nothing is saved or set aside. When the plan looks right, you can start the batches straight from it.
Before you start
An approved recipe for each product. A plan uses each product's latest approved recipe version unless you choose another. A product without one is listed as 'No approved recipe' and left out of the figures.
Building a plan
- Open Plan production
Open Batches from the main menu and select Plan production, beside New batch.
- Add your products
Select Add product and choose a product. The Recipe column shows the recipe version the plan uses. When a product has more than one approved version, the Recipe column is a list with the latest chosen: choose another to plan that one instead. The chosen version's description shows under it, and if its ingredients, steps or CCP checks differ from the latest's, a note says how. Add a row for each product you're making.
- Set the number of batches
Use the minus and plus buttons, or type a number. Each batch is the recipe as written, so three batches need three times the recipe.
- Read the stock check
The Stock check below updates as you change the plan. Start with the summary cards: Ingredients short, Can't confirm, and Enough in stock.
Reading the stock check
Each ingredient the plan needs gets one row:
- Need: the total across every product in the plan.
- Usable: stock on hand that isn't on hold, expired, or recorded in a unit that doesn't fit the ingredient. A lot is usable up to and including its expiry date.
- In open batches: what batches already in progress still need, after the lots they've recorded. A batch you started yesterday and haven't finished is already counting on that stock.
- Available: usable stock minus what open batches still need.
- Short: how much more you need, when Available doesn't cover Need.
The Status column reads Enough, Short, None usable (nothing on hand can be used), Can't confirm, or Made in house. An ingredient you make yourself is never counted as short.
Select the arrow at the start of a row to open it. Needed by splits the need by product, Stock lists anything not counted (held, expired, in another unit) and each open batch's share, and Suggested lots lists the lots to use, oldest expiry first. Suggestions are a guide only: nothing is reserved, and you choose the actual lots on the production floor.
The shopping list
Under the stock check, the Shopping list gathers every shortage by supplier. The estimated cost of the whole plan sits at the top, and each supplier shows its own subtotal. Each line shows:
- Short: how much the plan is short, in the recipe's units.
- Order: what to order, in whole packs of the size you usually buy from that supplier. When that supplier has no pack size on record, Crown uses the pack size you buy most often from anyone; with none at all, the unit you buy it in, or the recipe's units if you've never received it.
- Est. cost: that order at the price on your newest delivery of it from that supplier, or from any supplier when that supplier has none. Deliveries that failed inspection, or have no price, don't count. Shipping and tax aren't included.
Crown puts each ingredient under the supplier you've bought the most of it from in the 90 days up to your last delivery of it. When no supplier there can be used (there are no deliveries on record, or their suppliers are suspended or archived), it uses the ingredient's supplier links, preferring an approved supplier, then conditional, then pending, and then who you've received the ingredient from before. A suspended supplier is never suggested: an ingredient whose only supplier is suspended goes under 'Only a suspended supplier', and one with no supplier on record under 'No supplier set'.
Select Export CSV for a spreadsheet, which also lists each supplier's minimum order and lead time, or Print / PDF for a printable copy.
Creating the batches
When the plan is ready, select Create batches. The confirmation lists each product with its recipe version and how many batches it will start, with the same calibration and held-lot warnings New batch shows. Warnings don't block the start.
Confirm, and Crown starts each batch as a full batch, in progress, exactly as New batch does, on the recipe version the plan shows. If that version stops being approved after you open the plan, that product isn't created. The results list links to every batch it created, and names any it couldn't create with the reason. You can create up to 50 batches at a time.
Batches started together from one plan count as one run. Each shows the notes from the run before the plan, not from the batch created beside it. See Notes from the last batch.
What's next
Work each batch on the floor. See Recording production steps.