We are a t-shirt company that has prepared and un-prepared products. When a customer submits an order, some items can be pulled from the shop floor and some items need to be assembled. I’m looking for an app or process that can help organize and manage this process.
It would be nice to note on the order per item where it came from (Stock Floor or Custom Created). If it’s custom, that would trigger a notification to our production team to create the t-shirt and keep track of the pieces used so inventory can be properly updated on their end.
Looking for suggestions or apps that could potentially help with this as right now it’s word of mouth and sticky notes. There’s so much confusion and inventory counts are constantly off.
I’m not sure if I’m understanding your requirements correctly, but do you basically just need a way to split up the line items in the order so those that are custom are sent to your production team?
When a customer places an order on your store, how do you currently determine which line items are “custom” and which are from the “stock floor”? Do you manually check a specific product/variant attribute in Shopify like the product type/vendor/custom Metafield?
If there’s some field that already exist in the product/variant record that can be used to differentiate between them, our app EZ Exporter might be able to assist with this by filtering the individual line items in the order and automatically send a CSV/Excel file containing order data with just the relevant line items to your production team (via email or push to Google Sheets, Dropbox, etc.).
Our shopify inventory doesnt differentiate between what is custom vs pre-made(floor stock). They are all set on one complete t-shirt, ready for purchase. Us on the backend work though where if it gets pulled or created.
This is the piece of the process where things start going all over the place. We need a way to notate on the order (not customer visable), what has been pulled from the floor and what is outstanding (being made). This way both teams (order fulfillment and production) are on the same page as the order is being put together.
Production scheduling is kinda what your looking for, but likely you will need several apps to bring any custom process to together without building a custom app.
Maybe something like katana manufacturing or craftybase.
But man is the appstore search is hot garbage for this niche for some dumb reason.
Likely too many apps being allowed to over optimize broad words and bundle/sync’ing sucking all the air out of space.
So this devolves down to wading through order tagger apps if an off the shelf is a must. https://apps.shopify.com/search?q=order%20tagger
Or into product personalization apps that has some form of this as a subfeature.
Note that apps or custom apps pretty much have to separate dashboards for this stuff when it’s any thing more than tags.
In admin UI customizations aren’t that granular though for the savvy can can be done with browser extensions.
There’s also that this is the problem with defaulting to using the bare minimum admin shopify gives you.
So you may want to shif the problem into either ERP/WMS territory , or see lowcode services like retool/airtable to build custom process dashboards etc.
Hi @PartyBearTime, the app Material Manager might be able to help here. It lets you keep a separate inventory of raw materials that you can then link to your Shopify products as needed. When those products are ordered the material inventory is adjusted and on the orders you can see the materials used.
It also lets you set pre-assembled inventory for products that use materials that it can draw from first and then use your raw materials if it runs out.
Ah, I see what you mean, I totally misunderstood. This does seem tricky and our app won’t be helpful in this case.
You could potentially use a product/variant list metafield to store the related components of the final product, but that info won’t show up on the order detail page in the Shopify Admin since they’re attached to the product record. You’d also probably want to store the quantity required for each component and then sync up the inventory as well.
It sounds like the “Material Manager” app Joe47 mentioned might be a good fit here.
Your app and other ETL apps can help in these situations if they just boil away most the cruft to a spreadsheet dashboard and are willing to live with that UX. meaning NOT getting stuck on working in the shopify-admin for everyting , as it just isn’t built for this beyond using tags on the order-list page and saved-views.