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 is its recipe: the method materials (its bill of materials) and the method operations (its routing). Every made part has one, and it's where the answer to "how is this built?" actually lives.
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
These are two different questions, and Carbon keeps them separate:
- Method type answers how does this part get into its parent? — Make to Order, Purchase to Order, or Pull from Inventory.
- 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; the replenishment system is what planning reads to decide between a job and a 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, Carbon runs Get Method — it copies the part's method into a job-specific copy. The job edits that copy; the part master is never touched silently. Push a proven change back up and the next job inherits 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.