Raw material tagging v2
So, we have companies, products, and orders. However, when tracking costs of products, it seems the most effective way is to track the raw materials used. So, if a chair uses 4 2x4s and 2 widgets, if each 2x4 is 4kg raw material "wood" and each widget is 6kg steel, which is 9kg raw material "iron ore" then we can say that a chair is 16kg wood and 18kg iron ore.
However, since raw materials are going to essentially be yet another output from a company, we need some way to tag them as "special" since we want to attribute raw materials to products.
In essence, we could say "these are products that have no other inputs" and that makes sense, however it's unlikely that every company will enter all inputs to all their products. Secondly, we don't necessarily want to give companies the ability to mark their own products as raw materials (lest "widgets" show up in the raw material list rather than "iron ore").
So we need some way to tag products as raw materials so when they're included as inputs to other products, we know to track them directly. Here are some ideas I have around this:
- Allow a socially curated list of raw materials
- Allow tagging a product as some one of the socially listed raw materials (say, "iron"). Maybe this will be tagged by the company producing the material and validated socially.
- Allow attaching various metadata to the product. This might be "came from X iron mine." This metadata should be propagated along with products using it as an input to production. So instead of seeing "this widget uses 5kg iron" it will be "this widget uses 3kg of iron from the Minnesota Mesabi range and 2kg iron from Michigan"
The tagging and the attachment of metadata allows a number of things:
- Marking of raw materials so we know to account for them as such in our costs
- Bucketing raw materials not just by type, but by source, which in the spirit of disaggregate costs, might tell us more than just "5kg iron" but rather "3kg iron from a mine that is near depletion"
So if we want to just see how much iron a product has, we simply add all raw materials tagged as "iron" but if we want to see source information, it is disaggregated in the list of raw materials.
As far as the socially curated tags and the assignment of tags to products, that's another topic. Perhaps there's a way to automatically tag the company's location to the resulting raw material product so they don't need to perform any data entry at all.