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Formula and Receipe Management Simplified with Ostendo Phantoms

A manufacturer of natural health products needed to improve how they managed the formulas and recipes for their blends.

The same blends were used in a number of their products. Whenever the formual or recipe of the blend changed, updating multiple bills of material was a time consuming task that carried a high risk of error in missing an important update to one of the bills of materials.

This is where a little understood function in Ostendo called ‘Phantoms’ made an immense difference. The term is not as mysterious as it sounds. Phantoms are given an item code and a bill of materials, but they are not manufactured, stocked or sold as an item in its own right. They are called phantoms because they don’t actually exist as an item. They can be used to define and manage formulas and recipes for blends that are used in many products in their bill of materials.

Instead of having to enter and maintain the same list of ingredients in every applicable bill of materials, the phantom item only needs to be listed as the blend in each bill of material. When a work order is created to manufacture the parent item the component ingredients of the phantom bill of materials formula or recipe explode into the work order. 

This is a very convenient way of maintaining formulas and recipes for blends that are common in multiple products. The formula or recipe of a phantom blend can be updated once in the phantom bill of materials and all bills of materials containing the phantom blend are automatically updated. Revision tracking can be used for formula and recipe version management. This significantly improves accuracy and efficiency in formula and recipe management and simplifies the whole process of updating blends.

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