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inventree / InvenTree

Open Source Inventory Management System
https://docs.inventree.org
MIT License
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[FR] Add labor time for build orders #8530

Open MIOsystems opened 2 days ago

MIOsystems commented 2 days ago

Please verify that this feature request has NOT been suggested before.

Problem statement

Time is money. When building thinks the cost of time will add to the cost of the bought components. To get a good inside to the real cost of the product, it is essential to involve its build time as well and accumulate it over the whole project.

Suggested solution

We can add values of time spend when we complete a build output. When the build is done there will be a total build time. Finally it can be average or range for each part. Same as the cost component.

Now we have a good price in indication for the bought components, but the build time is as much of a value as the money we spent on the components we bought.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Now we have a good price in indication for the bought components, but the build time is as much of a value as the money we spent on the components we bought.

Examples of other systems

No response

Do you want to develop this?

SchrodingersGat commented 1 day ago

Hi @MIOsystems thanks for raising this. This makes sense and I can see how this would be a benefit to the system. The potential issues here are that we start to introduce complex pricing calculation options which are hard to document and maintain, and also do not directly benefit all users. Additionally, the new behaviours may run contrary to how other users wish to maintain pricing.

There are a number of similar outstanding issues related to custom pricing calculations:

(and there are probably others too).

Where I think we should head is to rework the existing pricing calculation system, to allow for plugins to be able to calculate and augment pricing calculations. This way, "custom" pricing information such as labour costs, etc, etc, can be integrated as desired.

However, some consideration needs to be given to where the "injection points" for the plugin system should be and what power they have over pricing.

Currently, even just for calculating the "price range" for a given part there are a lot of complex options - which have been introduced in an attempt to accommodate multiple competing objectives for calculating prices. This has led to confusing settings and I think would be better served by being a bit more "generic".

There are other pricing calculations which could be exposed to the plugin system too:

@wolflu05 @matmair do you guys have any thoughts about this? I've been putting this off for a while but I think the plugins system is a better way to handle anything other than "basic" pricing considerations

gunstr commented 1 day ago

@MIOsystems, just a humble suggestion... I have solved adding the build cost by treating it just as any other part in the BoMs:

  1. Create parts for relevant categories of build activites. I use assembly hours and testing hours. Set the internal price to the hourly rate you have for each category.
  2. Add a large amount of stock for each "build activity part" and add more when needed
  3. Add relevant build time to the different BoM's and allocate the same when you create build orders

For each part I can now see the complete cost including the predicted build cost. As a bonus I can also see how many hours of each category that has been allocated to build orders - basically upcoming work load.

This solution might not work exactly as you want for me it works very well.