Create variant-specific product recipes, simplifying custom product features such as size and color. This functionality enables more efficient production setup by allowing the assignment of different ingredients or materials to specific product variants within the same product card, streamlining setup and updates.
Each variant of a product can have a Product Recipe created for it. This article focuses on how to create variant-specific recipes. If you're unfamiliar with variants in Katana, we suggest reading what are variants and how to set up variants.
Getting the most out of Product Recipes
Using the variants feature together with a variant-specific Product Recipe setup is more powerful than creating separate product cards and separate recipes for each variant as this makes:
Initial setup of variants and recipes easier
Changes to recipes faster and more convenient. If you need to replace an ingredient that is used for all product variants, you can change it with a few clicks on a single product card, rather than replacing the same ingredient for each variant separately.
If you enable variants for a product in the General info tab 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 the Product Recipe / BOM:
Variant Options appear as columns
Option Values appear as selections in the drop-down menu for each Variant option and each ingredient
For example, if you enable variants for a product and insert "Color" and "Size" as Variant options:
Initially the Product Recipe section may look something like this (in this example, 3 ingredients are already entered into the recipe, all of which currently apply to all product variants):
In most cases, you'll probably use different ingredients for each variant (some ingredients might match, but some are likely different).
Creating variant-specific Product Recipes
Let's go ahead and begin creating some variant-specific Product Recipes
Add materials (or subassemblies) to the Product Recipe. You can start by entering all the ingredients required by all product variants and then head to the next step or you can enter an ingredient and immediately assign it to specific variants.
Tip: You can also create variants for materials to use them in the Product recipe. However, you cannot create material variants through the quick-add feature (i.e. by typing a material name to the ingredient field, selecting "Create new: [material name]" from the drop-down menu and filling in the info in the pop-up window). To create material variants, navigate to the material card.
Assign ingredients to specific variants. Select one or more variant Option values for each ingredient by clicking on a cell in any Variant option column and selecting relevant Option values from the drop-down menu. By default, an ingredient is assigned to all variants (as shown by "-all-" statuses). This means that an ingredient is included in the recipe for all the product's variants.
In the example above, we created color and size variants for some materials, entered those into the product recipe and then assigned them to relevant product variants. The correct product recipe might now look something like this:
In this example, we used shorter and longer versions of wooden handles for small and large hammers, but we use the same handles for all hammer color variants. Our hammerheads are in a different color, so we need to assign each hammerhead to a specific hammer color variant (but we use the same hammerheads for both small and large hammers). Our special Jack's Badge only comes with Gold and Green Large hammers.
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