Built on the fly

Some products don’t have a recipe. What they’re made of isn’t known until the order comes in, because the customer told you — a charm necklace where the charms are the whole point, a gift box assembled from the cart. Until now Orderkraft only knew one kind of production: read the bill of materials, build that. When the parts live on the order itself, production had to guess.

Built on the fly is a third production strategy, next to Regular and Made to order. Set it on a product whose composition changes with every order, and Orderkraft starts pulling the parts from the customer’s cart instead of from a bill of materials.

Added

• A Built on the fly production strategy on products. It sits alongside Regular and Made to order, and it tells Orderkraft to read the picked parts from the order itself.
• A Settings → Built-on-the-fly configuration page that tells Orderkraft how your storefront marks the grouping. Shopify has more than one convention for saying “these three lines belong together”, and Orderkraft can’t guess yours. Three options: Don’t group for stores that don’t sell pick-your-parts products, Bundle app for Shopify bundle apps that tag parent and parts with the same group identifier, and Custom theme for themes a developer built, where only the parts carry the grouping mark and Orderkraft finds the parent among the other lines.
• A Create missing materials switch on the same page. When it’s on, a part on an order whose SKU isn’t in your catalog yet becomes a material instead of being skipped. When it’s off, that part is skipped and shows up on the manufacturing order as a missing input rather than blocking the import.
• Picked parts show up on the manufacturing order alongside the bill of materials, each tagged Customer’s choice with the material name linking back to that line on the Shopify order. A product can carry both: the chain from the recipe, the charm from the cart.

Changed

• A line composed in the cart now opens its own manufacturing order even when the product has no bill of materials behind it. Before, a product with an empty recipe produced no work, so a built-on-the-fly product fell through the queue.
• The docs: Built on the fly and Set up built on the fly.

Set the strategy on a product, then tell Orderkraft which grouping your storefront uses. Don’t group is the safe default. If you’re not sure which one is yours, there’s a Contact us link on the settings page for exactly that.