Methods & sourcing
How Carbon decides whether each part is made, bought, or pulled from stock, and how a job gets its own copy of the recipe.
A part's manufacturing method defines its method materials (bill of materials) and method operations (routing). Every made part requires a method.
Method type
Every item carries a method type that routes it down one of three paths. You set it on the item; every bill of materials that uses the item mirrors it.
| Method type | What happens |
|---|---|
| Make to Order | Manufactured in-house. Becomes its own job with a routing. |
| Purchase to Order | Purchased. Flows through purchasing as a purchase order. |
| Pull from Inventory | Pulled from stock when its parent is built. |
The method type lives on the item, not on each BoM line. Change it once and it cascades to every method that references the part — draft methods only; active and archived methods stay frozen.
Method type vs replenishment system
Method type and replenishment system answer different questions:
- Method type answers how does this part get into its parent? , , or .
- Replenishment system answers how is this part replenished overall, and which planning queue does it
land in?
Buy,Make, orBuy and Make.
A part can be made for one parent and pulled from stock for another. Planning uses the replenishment system to choose between a job and purchase order.
Kit or subassembly
A Make to Order item inside a bill of materials is one of two things:
| Subassembly | Kit | |
|---|---|---|
| Built as | its own job + routing | nothing separate |
| Components | consumed by the subassembly job | issued together into the parent job |
| Use when | the thing is genuinely manufactured | a group of parts always goes in as a set |
Get Method
When you create a job, Get Method copies the part's method into a job-specific record. Changes to that copy do not modify the part master. If an approved change is pushed back to the master, later jobs inherit it.
Methods are versioned: Draft, Active, or Archived. Only a Draft is editable; an Active method is frozen so jobs already running against it don't shift mid-build.
With strict backflush on, a version cannot be made Active until each material pulled from stock has a Pull From storage unit.