Flour, resin and cable: running a bakery, workshop or shop floor on weight and volume
Units of measure are easy to describe in the abstract: give an item a unit, quantities follow. The interesting part is what that looks like on a real shelf. Here are three businesses that never fitted a piece count, set up end to end: the items, the thresholds, the lots, the reorders and, in two cases, the recipes.
1. The bakery: kilos and litres
A small bakery runs on a dozen bulk ingredients and a few hundred packaged ones. The packaged ones (boxes, bags, trays) are ordinary counts. The bulk ones are where spreadsheets go to die: flour in 25 kg sacks, sugar in 20 kg bags, milk in 10 L bladders, butter in 5 kg blocks, all opened mid-shift and used by the scoop.
Items. Bread flour (kg), sugar (kg), butter (kg), whole milk (L), olive oil (L). Each gets its unit in the item editor and the counts are entered from the scale, decimals and all: 37.5 kg of flour is 37.5, not “1.5 sacks”.
Thresholds. Flour gets a warning level of 20 kg and a critical level of 10 kg, which is roughly a day and a half of baking. The row turns yellow, then red, and the Teams channel gets “Bread flour: 9.5 kg left” rather than a bare number someone has to decode.
Recipes. This is where measured components earn their keep. Make an assembly called “Sourdough loaf” with components of 0.5 kg flour, 0.01 kg salt and 0.35 L water. The assembly page now shows how many loaves the current stock can make, floored to a whole loaf, and completing a batch of 40 loaves subtracts 20 kg of flour in one move. The assemblies guide covers the mechanics.
Reordering. A reorder point of 30 kg and a reorder quantity of 50 kg (two sacks) means the draft purchase order is written in kilos, which is what the mill invoices in anyway.
2. The makerspace: grams, litres and lots
A makerspace has the opposite problem: dozens of consumables in small quantities, each bought in a different container. 3D printer filament comes on 1 kg spools and is used by the gram. Casting resin comes in 1 L bottles and is used by the millilitre. Laser plywood comes in sheets, which are a count, but adhesive, lubricant and isopropyl come in whatever size was on sale.
Items. PLA filament, black (g). PETG filament, clear (g). Casting resin (ml). Cutting fluid (L). Each is one item, tracked in the unit the members actually read off a scale or a measuring cup. 750 g of black PLA is 750, and the row turns yellow at 300 because that is one more print, not two.
Lots. Filament spools are the natural fit for unit-level tracking on a measured item. Turn tracking on and each spool becomes a stock line with its own quantity and a lot field: “Spool 14, 920 g, batch 2026-09”, “Spool 15, 1000 g, batch 2026-10”. Members weigh the spool they used and update that line. The item total is the sum, and when a batch prints badly you know exactly which spools came from it.
Resin by the millilitre. Resin is a good example of why decimals matter. A member pours 37 ml into a mould; the Add/Subtract pad takes −37 as easily as −1. Nobody has to pretend a bottle is one unit until it is suddenly zero.
3. The shop floor: metres on a reel
An electrical contractor, a sign shop or a small fabricator keeps stock on reels and in lengths: cable, vinyl, weatherstrip, tubing, steel bar. Nobody counts reels. They look at how much is left and guess, which is how a van turns up to a job 20 metres short.
Items. 2.5 mm twin and earth (m). 6 mm armoured cable (m). Matte vinyl, 610 mm (m). Copper tube, 15 mm (m). A 100 m drum of cable is 100, and after a job that used 23.4 m it is 76.6.
Sending and completing. Jobs are outbound orders. The order line for “2.5 mm twin and earth” says 45 m, which moves 45 m into Sending the moment the order is created and out of stock when the job is completed. The van and site stock workflow is unchanged; the numbers simply have a unit now.
Snapshots. Month-end reconciliation snapshots record the metres on hand per reel item, so the next stock-take compares 76.6 m against what the tape measure says, not a reel count against a different reel count.
Custom lengths. If your supplier sells by the foot and your team measures in metres, pick one and stick with it. The unit is a label and will not convert for you, which is the safer behaviour when a wrong dropdown could otherwise rewrite the stock of every reel in the building.
What all three have in common
- The unit is chosen once, per item. Flour is in kg forever. Resin is in ml forever. Nobody has to remember which number means what.
- Decimals are normal. 76.6 m, 37.5 kg and 920 g are first-class values everywhere: counts, thresholds, order lines, history.
- Pieces still exist. Boxes of cups, sheets of plywood and junction boxes stay on Each. Mixing measured and counted items in one inventory is the whole point.
- The AI sees the unit too. Ask an assistant how much flour is left and it answers in kilos, because the MCP server tells it the unit along with the number.