Create variant-specific product recipes, simplifying custom product features such as size and color. This functionality enables more efficient production setups 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, check out what are variants and how to set up variants.
Note: If the option to create/edit a product recipe isn't available, take a look at this article regarding user permissions.
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 "Hair type" and "Color" as variant options:
Initially, the product recipe section may look something like this (in this example, 2 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 create variants for materials to use in the product recipe. However, you can't create material variants through the quick-add feature (i.e., by typing a material name into 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 size and hair type 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:
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