In this article, we focus on how to create variant-specific operations. If you are unfamiliar with variants in Katana, you may want to first read what are variants and how to set up variants.
Using our variants feature together with variant-specific Production operations is more powerful than creating separate product cards and separate operations for each variant:
More straightforward initial setup of variants and operations
Changes to operations are faster and more convenient. If you need to change an operation, Resource, Time, or the Cost per Hour used for all product variants, you can change it with a few clicks on a single product card, rather than replacing the same value for each variant on each product card separately.
How product variant options are displayed on the Production operations tab
If you enabled variants for a product in the General info section of a product card, you can enter relevant Variant Options (e.g. type, size, color) and Option Values (e.g. small, large, green, blue).
In Production operations:
Variant options appear as columns
Option values appear as possible selections in the drop-down menu for each Variant option and ingredient.
As an example, if you enabled variants for a product and insert "Color" and "Size" as Variant Options:
Initially, the Production operations section may look something like this (in this example, 3 operations are already added to the recipe, all of which currently apply to all product variants):
Assigning operations to specific variants
If you need to use different operations for each variant (some operations may match, while others are likely different).
To create variant-specific Production operations:
Add your Operations by entering all the operations required by the product variants and then proceeding to the next step or enter an operation and immediately assign it to specific variants.
Assign operations to specific variants by selecting one or more variant Option values for each operation by clicking on a cell in any Variant option column and selecting the relevant Option values from the drop-down menu. By default, an operation is assigned to all variants (as shown by -all- statuses).
In this example, Quality Control is only for the Golden version of the hammer (both small and large size), but cutting and assembly are done for all colors and sizes.