Recipes
This is an early page about recipes. They have evolved some since then. Here is a new page about different recipe types.
Recipes are intended to contain all the information required to manufacture a product.
They are combinations of bills of material, processing instructions (routings), other inputs like labor and equipment requirements, and possible suppliers for the inputs.
They are also recursive structures. In other words, if an input component has a recipe itself, that recipe can be incorporated into its parent, so you can view a processing tree from parents through children unto many generations.
For example:
Recipes can also extend into other networks and organizations to provide a structure for whole supply chains.
For planning, a dependent demand explosion algorithm reads the recipe and creates production schedules with material, labor and equipment requirements.