Hey All,
We’re working on building out a 2 Boards, one being our “Products” board, and the other our “Materials” board. We’re a manufacturing company with nearly 1,000 products, with each product having up to 74 ingredients (or more) per product. There are close to 1,700 different ingredients that we utilize across the 1,000 different products. The intent is for sales orders, to eventually connect to the specific “Product” for the order, which is made up of the different ingredients, pulling through for our production team to pull up all the ingredients and instructions for manufacturing. This should be achieved by simply connecting the product to the 3rd “Sales Orders” board, and pulling all info over through mirrored columns from the Production (source) to Sales Orders (target). MY issue is creating the Production board.
Here are my issues:
- For every product, I need to apply up to 100 materials (easy, looks like I can go up to 750 connected items per connected board cell). I can then mirror over all the fields I need to from the materials board. HOWEVER, the rub is that I simply need to be able to adjust the “quantity” amount of each ingredient, unless I can create another mirror field that does NOT change the original source board info, as we will use the same ingredient with potentially hundreds of other products (so materials board cannot be edited for each product creation). As in: I need 50 Units of Ingredient A, 37 units of Ingredient B, etc [up to 100 different ingredients and measure]
This route also works well for then viewing all the ingredients from each item by adding the “Connected Boards” widget. There’s even the convenience of ‘adding’ another ingredient right there, which is great for our team and creating new products, but still doesn’t solve the issue of the “quantity” per ingredient, without seemingly altering the original ingredient on the “material” board.
Alternatively, I thought perhaps the use of subitems.
- Subitems option allows me to fix the above - assign a material, mirror all necessary columns, then add the “Qty” for each material, then mirror that info to the “Parent” item - Cool! This seems good.
- I still have the Subitem Widget on the item itself, allowing me to view all ingredients, and even generate PDF docs off of it for production team (through use of DocuGen, Eledo, etc) - great. A must have.
Here are my apparently pitfalls here for using subitems:
- Mirroring to the “Product” (parent item) to the new sales order board: mirror columns are not visible in the “subitems widget” on the item, so this immediately nixes this as an option to mirror to subitems on the sales order form. Simply put - the products must be mirrored right to the item (O.k., that’s fine!).
- I lose the nice printability right on the sales order board - Ok, so we have to print from the Product Board, easy work around
- I can’t “add” subitem from the subitem widget like I can the Connected Board widget (odd? and bummer - much less desireable)
- By combining multiple items into a single mirrored cell, I lose functionality of generating a documentation or calculating fields off of each individual ingredient. So this makes producing work order documents impossible.
My Logical Alternative to achieve everything:
Create a separate “Connected Board” column for every ingredient (100 connected board columns to allow for up to 100 ingredients/materials… Not efficient) and then add QTY amount for every single ingredient (another 100 ‘number’ columns). This is far from ideal and seems crazy.
I’m stuck - what are the options I’m not thinking of to ensure I can create a product using mirror fields. I can’t do a single product per board, as I’d use up all my connected board limits too quickly.
Thanks in advance!
Hi There!
This is an ambitious build and you made a lot of good process.
My recommendation would be to think of each of the sources of data as a Database and utilize parent items for each.
Once this is set up with a general structure that matches, then I would use in the Saving board a MATCH automation for the actions around selections.
I wanted to share with you also our selection app that utilizes this model but more user friendly for a pricing catalog.
Happy to walk you thorough some of these examples and come up with a game plan jsut reach out!
https://www.axanexa.com/contact-us/
Mike B
Automation Architect
Hi Marty,
Your post and problem are really well laid out. I totally relate to your issue.
Currently I am building a “consumable” materials solution for a construction company. Adding layers of complexity definitely makes building that model much more difficult. It’s almost as if your data needs to work in multiple dimensions.
What I would say is that there isn’t one single correct solution. In creating a model, you just need something that suitably represents your process in a way that will benefit your actual process.
How can you approach this?
Think about what abstract concepts you can introduce here. I think that you’re half way there with the subitems.
What about a new board called “Ingredient Requirements”. Each “Ingredient Requirement” item would connect to a single material and a single product. With the Ingredient Requirement item, you can store data related to quantity.
You can also mirror the product’s “Orders” connection column to the Ingredient Requirement board and use it as a filter. That filter will allow you to visualize all the Ingredient Requirements for an Order, with a column indicating the associated product.
I don’t think this fully solves your problem. There are complicated questions in a solution like yours.
Maybe it isn’t part of your solution or your current problem, but questions will inevitably arise around:
- How do you manage orders that order more than one of the same product?
- How do you manage your Materials inventory and track depletion of Materials?
- Your monday.com limits—you’re going to run into problems trying to store 50,000 “Ingredient Requirements” (you would also face this problem using subitems). This will apply until at least this Summer, when monday.com is rolling our 100k item boards (currently the limit is 20k on Enterprise I believe)
So there are a lot of problems to solve. I wish you luck! And if you need help working through your requirements and building something really robust, feel free to reach out to me.
Mike,
I’d be interested in better understanding the functionality. Looks promising but want to ensure I maintain certain functionality here - LMK best way to connect with you
Feel free to schedule a consult here and we can chat
Thank you, Francis! Your suggestion on the Ingredient Requirement board is interesting, but I’m not sure I’m completely following. If I utilize the Unit of Measure in the Ingredient Requirement board and mirror it, what benefits does this bring over simply utilizing a NUmber column and mirroring that number column to my Sales Order board? I still am unable to create a formula based on Number of items per order.
For example. A brownie is the order
1 Brownie requires 0.50 Cup of sugar, 1 Tbsp of Stevia, etc
0.50 Cup of sugar costs $0.035 (we’ll say)
Client orders 50 brownies.
I want to calculate both the cost of each ingredient + calculate via formula the total Cups of Sugar and Tbsp of Stevia for the total order, while also maintaining my Inventory automations with Vlookup function. (separate story)
Obviously I dont know how to make brownie. But I think the point is made. Maybe I’m looking at a pretty custom buildout here with lots of add-ons?
