Does anyone have any guidance on how to deal with metric/imperial stock? We currently manufacturer in Oceania using metric units for raw materials like plywood, but we’re starting to manufacture in North America where materials like plywood sheets use imperial units (ft/inches).
For manufacturing in Oceania we a item template for plywood i.e. PINE_PLY with variants attributes for depth, width and length, which gives us item variants like Radiata Pine Plywood-18-1200-2400-CD-STRUCT. My thinking is there’s a few options:
-
we create a separate item template for imperial plywood sheets, i.e.
PINE_PLY_IMP? -
make the imperial/metric an attribute on the
PINE_PLYtemplate, so it would be:Radiata Pine Plywood-18-1200-2400-CD-STRUCT-METandRadiata Pine Plywood-23/32-4-8-CD-STRUCT-IMP?
3. store everything in metric, so a 23/32”, 4x8ft plywood sheet would be Radiata Pine Plywood-18.25-1219.2-2438.4-CD-STRUCT? This keeps everything consistent but then wouldn’t match suppliers purchase order line items (not sure if you’re allowed full stops in item codes, would assume it would cause issues?)
The problem extends to other items such as fixings (nuts, bolts, screws), so not sure if that should impact our approach (would it be better to have a consistent approach across items, or just mix and match options depending on the item?)
Any one else dealt with mixing imperial/metric units across manufacturing? Are there any pitfalls we should watch out for with any of the above options? Are there other options I’m not thinking of? Should we just create a separate ERPNext deployment just for North America? Are there downstream workflows that could catch us out?
Any advice is welcomed!
– Luke