Start with the order

Meet the shop we'll follow through this guide: Nebula Aerospace, an OEM that builds satellites. One customer, NovaSat Networks, just placed an order for 90 solar array wings. By the end, you'll have followed that order all the way from the sales desk to 90 finished wings on the shipping dock — and seen most of Carbon along the way.

Carbon spans the office and the floor: ERP for orders, purchasing, and planning; MES for the people actually building. The thread that ties them together is a single order, so that's where we start.

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The sales order

Open the sales order dashboard. There's already an order on the books: SO000009, 90 SAW-001 Solar Array Wings at $35,000 each. But the customer doesn't want all 90 at once, so the order carries three lines of 30 — one this week, one next week, one the week after. That delivery schedule is going to shape everything downstream.

Shipping part of an order doesn't close it. The badge on the header reads "In Progress", the display status Carbon shows while the order's make-to-order lines still have production to finish; the stored status underneath is "To Ship and Invoice" while any unit has yet to ship. Once every unit has shipped but you haven't billed yet, it moves to "To Invoice". The order closes only when everything has both shipped and been invoiced. That's what lets one order be fulfilled in batches without losing track of what's left.

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Batch it into jobs

You don't build 90 wings as one monolithic job. To match the three-week delivery schedule, the order's three lines of 30 become three jobs of 30, one per delivery, each scheduled, released, and shipped on its own timeline.

You create those jobs from the sales order itself. The "Jobs Required" banner at the top of the order is the prompt; its "Create Jobs" button covers the whole order at once. To do it line by line, use the line's Jobs card: click "Make to Order" and the "Convert Line to Job" dialog opens with the Quantity already prefilled at the line's 30. Create the first job, then repeat for the second and third lines. Carbon counts down the units still waiting on a job (90 → 60 → 30), so you always know how much of the order is left to batch. To build only part of a line, lower the prefilled Quantity and convert the remainder later.

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Create the job

From the sales order, create the job. Carbon carries the part, quantity, and due date across automatically. The job inherits exactly what was sold. That way, the shop floor always has the up-to-date specifications and requirements for the job.

Carbon carries one more thing across, and it's the most important: the part's manufacturing method, its full recipe of materials and operations. The job doesn't point at the part's master recipe, though. It gets its own copy.

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Get the method

Pulling that recipe into the job is an explicit action in Carbon called Get Method. It clones the part's method, every material and every operation, into a job-specific method that belongs to this job alone.

That copy is the whole point. Say this batch needs a one-off substitution, like a different fastener or an extra inspection step. You edit the job's method, and the part master stays untouched. And when a change proves itself, you can push it back up to the part so every future job inherits it.

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Release or plan

Now the key decision. You'll release one job, week one, and leave the other two in planning. The difference is what each action sets in motion:

• Release: generates inventory alerts for any required material that isn't in stock, and adds the job's tasks to the shop-floor schedule. This is work the floor can start.
• Plan: generates the same inventory alerts, but does not schedule anything. It's how you see what a future job will need without the shop floor seeing it on the schedule. They are not yet notified about this job in any way.