Setting Up Product and Material Masters the Right Way

Most of the setup steps for a new plant in any system are forgettable: a business name, an address, a few dropdowns. One of them isn't. Getting a product's bottles-per-case figure and its linked bottle and cap material right, once, at setup, is what makes every production entry after it correct without anyone doing the arithmetic.

What that figure actually does

A product, say a 500 ml case, carries a bottles-per-case number and a reference to the specific bottle and cap material it consumes. When a production entry later records cases produced and rejections, that single link is what lets the material deduction happen automatically: the system already knows a case of this product needs this many bottles of that specific material and this many caps of that one. Skip this at setup, or set it loosely, and the automatic deduction is either wrong or doesn't happen at all.

Where this goes wrong in practice

The most common mistake isn't a typo in the bottles-per-case number, it's linking a product to the wrong material variant. A plant that runs two slightly different preform weights for what looks like the "same" bottle, or two cap colors bought from different vendors, has to pick the correct specific material at setup, not just something in the same category. Get this wrong and every production entry afterward deducts from the wrong material's stock, quietly, in the same direction, until someone notices raw material stock doesn't match a physical count.

Materials, not just products, need the same care

Each material, preforms, caps, labels, shrink film, cartons, needs its own unit (pieces, rolls, litres) and its own low-stock threshold. A threshold copied from another material "because it's close enough" produces either constant false alarms or a shortage that never gets flagged. This is worth setting deliberately per material, based on how fast that specific one actually moves, not as a single number applied everywhere.

Opening stock is a one-time decision

Opening stock is set when a material is created and can't be edited afterward. That's deliberate: it stops a material's history from being quietly rewritten later. It also means it's worth getting the opening count right the first time, from an actual physical count at setup, rather than an estimate that gets "corrected" retroactively.

The payoff for getting this right once

None of this is complicated, it's just easy to rush through during setup because it doesn't feel like the important part. It is. A plant that spends an extra hour getting product and material links right at setup spends far less time later reconciling why raw material stock doesn't match what's actually in the yard.

See how production entries use this setup automatically