Sooner or later a supplier discontinues a material, hikes a price, or lets you down, and you have to switch. It sounds like a small swap, but a material change ripples outward: a different cost, a possibly different result in the product, and every recipe that used it now affected. Handled carelessly, it surprises you at the worst time; handled deliberately, it's routine.
What a material change touches
- Cost: a new source means a new price, which changes your true cost and maybe your price.
- Quality: a substitute may behave differently; test before you commit a batch.
- Recipes: every product using the old material needs the new one swapped in.
- Stock: you may have old material to use up first.
Make the switch cleanly
- Test the new material on a small batch before relying on it.
- Use up old stock first where quality allows (first in, first out).
- Update the cost and recipe everywhere the material is used.
- Recheck the price of any product whose cost moved.
A material change isn't done when the new box arrives. It's done when your costs, recipes, and prices have caught up to it.
Don't let the cost change slip by
The quiet danger is updating the material but forgetting it changed your product costs, so you keep pricing on the old number. Treat a supplier switch like a material price change: recalculate and adjust.
Change a material once, update everywhere
The tedious part of a material change is chasing down every product it affects. Keepsel ties materials to the products that use them, so updating a material's cost flows through to every product's true cost automatically, and a supplier switch is one update, not a manual hunt.