Production Flow
Supply’d’s production flow makes it easy to manage everything from raw ingredients to finished products, so you can keep things moving smoothly and stay on top of every step.
Welcome to Supply'd Production!
Supply'd is your digital sidekick, helping you turn ingredients and labour into finished products - without the spreadsheets, guesswork, or headaches.
Whether you're baking cookies, preparing ready meals, or running a large production floor, Supply'd helps you keep production organised, inventory accurate, and your team on track.
The Essentials You Need First
Before you jump into production, make sure you've got the basics set up:
Products: Create the products you manufacture - How-to guide.
Inventory: Ensure your stock is accurate - How-to guide.
Production Settings: Set the product type to Production, then add your production stages and production items.
A little effort here saves a lot of pain later!
Stages & Sub-Recipes: Map Your Magic
Think about how your product moves through your business - from raw ingredients to finished goods.
Supply'd uses Stages and Sub-Recipes to mirror your real-world workflow.
Stages
Stages break your production into logical steps.
Simple Recipes
Think “cookie production” - one step after another.
For a simple product, that might be:
Weigh
Mix
Bake
Pack
Complex Recipes
For larger operations, stages often represent different teams or work areas:
Guided Weigh-Up
Make components
Assemble components
Bake
Cool & Pack
The Trap: Over-Segmenting
Because Supply'd gives you the power to create stages, it’s tempting to break a process down into micro-steps.
For example, a client making a cake might set up their stages like this: Bake → Cut → Fill → Ice → Sprinkle.
The Problem
In Supply'd, the next stage stays locked until the current stage is finalised. This means team members can't see their ingredients or instructions, even if they're ready to work.
For example: If one person is filling, another is frosting, and another is adding sprinkles, the sprinkles operator must wait until the frosting stage is closed before their pick list becomes available.
The Solution
Create stages around handoffs, not every individual task.
Instead of separate stages for Cut → Fill → Top → Sprinkle, combine them into a single Decorate stage, with each action listed as an instruction. This gives the whole team visibility from the start and keeps work flowing in parallel.
Rule of Thumb for Stages
A stage should only end when there is:
A Change of Hands: Responsibility passes to another person or team.
A Change of Location: The product moves to a different workstation or room.
A Significant Pause: The product must wait before the next step (eg. cooling, proofing, curing, or setting).
This rule keeps stages meaningful, improves visibility, and reduces unnecessary handoffs.
Sub-Recipes: Your Secret Weapon
Got components used in multiple products or made in big batches? Create sub-recipes!
If you make something once and use it in lots of different products, it's probably a Sub-Recipe.
Great examples include:
Sauces
Fillings
Doughs
Spice blends
Syrups
Instead of creating the same red sauce inside every lasagne recipe, make it once as a Sub-Recipe and simply add it wherever it's needed.
You'll get:
Better stock tracking
Less duplicate recipe maintenance
Easier production planning
The best part? Creating a Production Sub-Recipe is exactly the same as creating a Production Product - You will simply use it as one of the Production Items for Production Product.
👉 See the Creating a Production Product doc for full details.
The Trap: Hiding Shared Components Inside Final Products
Because it seems simpler at first glance, it's tempting to embed bulk components directly into the stages of your final product.
For example, a client making Lasagna for supermarkets might create a stage called "Make Red Sauce" directly inside the Lasagna recipe.
The Problem
Visibility: The team waiting to make the White Sauce or Assemble the Lasagna can't see their ingredients because the Red Sauce stage isn't finalised.
Duplicate Work: If you also sell Spaghetti Bolognese (which uses the exact same Red Sauce), or if you sell tubs of Red Sauce on their own, you are now managing that sauce in three different places.
Another example is time-gapped components, like Tiramisu. The biscuit base needs to be soaked in coffee syrup overnight. If you make "Soak Biscuits" a stage within the final Tiramisu build, your floor planners can't easily see the total volume of biscuits they need to soak today for tomorrow's production of five different Tiramisu flavours.
The Solution: Create a Sub-Recipe
Pull the Red Sauce (or the Soaked Biscuits) out of the final product and create it as its own Sub-Recipe. Then, add that Sub-Recipe as a single ingredient in the final Lasagna or Tiramisu product.
The Rule of Thumb for Sub-Recipes
A time-gap alone (like resting dough or marinating meat) doesn't mean you need a Sub-Recipe - that can just be a Stage!
You should only build a Sub-Recipe if the component meets at least one of these criteria:
It's shared: It is used as an ingredient across multiple different final products.
It's sellable: It can be sold entirely on its own to customers.
It's bulk inventory: It is made in massive bulk batches, stored, and drawn down over time for various runs (rather than made to order for one specific run)
Cheat Sheet: Stage vs. Sub-Recipe
It's a continuous process that doesn't stop moving down the line.
Multiple people are working on the product simultaneously at the same bench.
Combine them into 1 stage
The product needs to sit/marinate for 3 days, but is ONLY used for this one specific run.
The product needs to sit/marinate for 3 days AND is used across different finished products.
The component is batched in bulk, stored, and drawn down over the week.
You sell the component on its own to customers as a retail item.
The product changes hands from the hot kitchen team to the cold packing team.
"But that's too many Sub-Recipes to set up!"
When larger clients realise how many shared components they have, setting them up as Sub-Recipes can seem like a big task.
Here is the reality: You are already operating this way.
Your floor managers aren't looking at 10 different pasta products and making 10 separate tiny batches of red sauce. They are doing the mental maths (or scratchpad maths) to figure out exactly how much total Red Sauce is needed across all the products that require it for the week, and cooking one massive batch. Supply'd is simply digitising the maths you are already doing in your head. By putting the Sub-Recipes into the system, you stop relying on mental gymnastics and let the software handle the heavy lifting.
So, What Would Lasagna Production Look Like in a Complex Facility?
Production Runs: Where the Magic Happens
Once everything is set up, you're ready to create a Production Run.
A Production Run walks your team through each stage while Supply'd takes care of the admin behind the scenes by:
Tracking ingredients
Recording labour
Updating inventory
Recording finished products
Calculating production costs
Pro tip: Record labour and assign batches as you go for the most accurate costing and traceability - How to run production
How the Smart Production Plan Ties it All Together
Once you've structured your production with Stages and Sub-Recipes, Supply'd does the hard work for you.
Using sales orders, inventory levels and forecasts, Supply'd automatically calculates:
What needs to be produced
How much of each Sub-Recipe is required
The ingredients you'll need
Your overall production schedule
No more whiteboards or mental maths - Supply'd scales everything automatically.
👉 To learn more, see the Smart Production Plan doc.
Why It’s Awesome
With Supply'd Production you can:
✔ Keep production organised
✔ Improve inventory accuracy
✔ Track true product costs (including labour)
✔ Reduce waste
✔ Give your team clear production workflows
✔ Scale your operation with confidence
Ready to make production a breeze? Let's get started!
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