Batch manufacturing

Batch manufacturing means making a fixed quantity of one product at a time: 20 L of hot sauce, 5 kg of body butter, 200 jars of marmalade. Each batch is a discrete event with a start, an end, a recipe it followed and a quantity it produced. That event is the unit everything else attaches to: the cost, the lot code, the checks, the yield.

It is what most food, beverage and cosmetics makers actually do, and it is a different shape of work from the two things people confuse it with.

How it differs from the alternatives

Continuous production never stops to start again. A refinery runs, and the question “what did this batch cost” has no answer because there is no batch. Costing there is per hour or per tonne.

Discrete assembly builds a countable thing from countable parts: four legs and a top make a table. The bill of materials is a list of units, and nothing is measured out. A formula is not a list of units, it is a set of proportions, which is why formulas behave differently from bills of materials.

Batch manufacturing sits between them. You measure ingredients by weight, the output is one homogeneous quantity, and a recipe scales by ratio rather than by count.

What that means for the records

Because a batch is discrete, four things become answerable:

• What it cost. Every ingredient drawn at its weighted average cost on the day, plus packaging, labor and whatever else the batch consumed.
• What it produced. The yield, which is never exactly what the recipe predicted.
• What went into it. The specific lots drawn, which is what makes one-up, one-back tracing possible.
• Whether it was made correctly. The checkpoints signed off while it ran, kept in the batch record.

In BatchDash

A run is one batch. Planning it freezes the formula version so a later edit cannot change history, explodes the recipe down to raw ingredients, and tells you what is short. Completing it books the output into stock under a lot code and seals the record.

A 20 L run of a sauce that is 62 % habanero draws 12.4 kg of habanero at whatever the average cost was that morning. If a delivery landed the day before at a higher price, the batch you make today costs more than the one you made last week, and both figures stay true where they were recorded.

The pitch version of all this is on the batch records page.