[FR] Gastronomical usage

[k4n4lm00n]

Please verify that this feature request has NOT been suggested before.

• I checked and didn't find a similar feature request

Problem statement

Hi ! First of all thanks for the great work on this software !

I'm not quite sure if this is a feature request or a misunderstanding on how to use InvenTree, but we have a rather simple use case that we struggle to implement within the current logic.

While I didn't find any similar feature-request, it might be related with #2624

Suggested solution

We want to manage an inventory that is composed of food items and bottles and we mostly sell only small parts of those items, not the full items.

For the sake of the example, let's take a rum-apple drink composed of imaginary "Pirate Rum" and "Life Apple":

• we buy bottles of "Pirate Rum" that might be 100cL or 70cL and might come from different resellers
• we need all those single bottles to be summed up as a global "Pirate Rum" item so that we can deduce the sales from this global item
• we buy bottles of "Life Apple" that are 100cL and might come from different resellers
• we buy ice-cubes in 100 pieces
• we sell a rum-apple that consist of 4cL of rum + 20cL of apple juice + 2 ice-cubes

An more subtle example would be a pizza, but I guess this covers already the basic needs we have.

Describe alternatives you've considered

We could not manage to make InvenTree fit this situation :

• one major issue is that we can't just go into our warehouse, count the bottles, and update how many centiliters we currently have globally for a specific product
• another issue is when defining the actual "Pirate Life" product that we sell, we can only chose from specific bottles, but we can't tell the system to take from any bottle (for example always deduce form the oldest bottle added)

Is there a simple way to do that or should we look into other solutions ?

Best regards !

Examples of other systems

No response

Do you want to develop this?

• I want to develop this.

[SchrodingersGat]

@k4n4lm00n I'm not completely following your example, but I believe that what you are asking for is possible. If not with the core InvenTree software, then a custom plugin to manage your specific edge case requirements

[karliss]

"Units of measure for this part" for part and "Pack Quantity" for supplier part, does 70% of this.

The idea is that in part settings you would specify that "Pirate rum" is measured in "cl" instead default empty which would mean individual pieces/bottles.

In part suppliers/manufacturer section you can create multiple supplier parts, one for each bottle size. In "Pack Quantity" you could specify size of each bottle type. For example you could have "Pirate rum small bottle 0.7L (70cl)" and "Pirate rum big bottle 1L(100cl)". For some reason pack quantity is associated with "supplier part" not "manufacturer part", so there would be a little bit of extra work when defining each supplier part.

When creating new stock item you can check "Use pack size", and then specify number of bottles specific type you bought instead of manually calculating volume.

we buy bottles of "Life Apple" that are 100cL and might come from different resellers

Manufacturer and supplier are two separate things in inventree. You can have a single part with multiple "manufacturer parts" and multiple suppliers reselling each of the "manufacturer part". That should cover this part.

The part that's missing in my opinion is ability to use pack quantity when modifying stock item count. There you still have to specify amount in cl instead of bottles. Seems like currently only the initial addition of stock supports usage of "Pack quantity".

It would probably also not work well together with part serialization feature. Since in this case it would mean serializing each "cl" which doesn't make sense. It was unclear if you wanted to track each bottle individually or treat all of them interchangeably.

If you need to track the quantity in each bottle and total amount of bottles is relatively small, you could treat each individual bottle as separate stock item. That way you could subtract count from specific bottle if you wanted.

One more potential workaround for dealing with partial bottles, could be having a recipe which "creates" opened bottle from new bottle. Possibly in combination with part variant and bom substitute features. That way there is less confusion whether your "200cl stock of 1L bottles" is 2 full bottles which can be sold as whole or whether it's 4 half empty bottles which can only be used as ingredients in drinks. Downside is that extra layer of indirection will make it harder to track where and when you bought the opened bottle, since from inventree perspective you didn't buy it, you "created" it from full bottle.

Not sure I understood the part about choosing specific bottle. Although it will depend on your overall setup. When defining BOM, you just specify the general part. When executing build order you can:

• autoallocate the resource, optionally restricting to specific location of items from which to take
• manually allocate by choosing specific stock item (which can represent collection of bottles)
  I don't think there is builtin mechanism for more complex priorities during autoallocation like oldest first. From what I understand it will take first one in the list without any specific priority. On the other hand it also depends on humans executing the order to take the correct item from shelf. Not sure how detailed tracking is practical.

I hope this gave you some ideas.

[matmair]

I do not think InvenTree is optimal for this, it might be a bit too oriented for electronics manufacturing.