Material Reconciliation

The Material Reconciliation dashboard is the truth-check. For closed Batches and Production Orders, it shows the gap between planned consumption (per the Tech Pack BOM × order quantity) and actual consumption (per Stock Entries and Operation Ledger Entries posted against the Batch).

It's also covered briefly under Production — Dashboards; this page goes deeper because reconciliation is fundamentally a logistics question.

What it shows

Per Batch (or per Order), per material:

• Planned Qty — BOM consumption × Batch quantity.
• Issued Qty — actually moved from Raw Material to WIP (via Material Transfer Stock Entries).
• Consumed Qty — actually consumed by operations (via OLE consumption Stock Entries).
• Returned Qty — un-consumed material returned to Raw Material.
• Variance — Planned vs Consumed, in absolute terms and percent.
• Variance reason flag — if the variance is outside a tolerance, the dashboard highlights it.

Why this matters

Three things drive cost in a garment factory: labor, overhead, and material. Of the three, material is usually the biggest. A 5% material over-consumption across a season is the difference between a profitable line and a marginal one.

The reconciliation surfaces three patterns:

• Consistent over-consumption on a specific style. The Tech Pack BOM is wrong — consumption per garment is higher than the spec. Update the Tech Pack (and re-run cost-margin analysis for any pending Orders of the style).
• Consistent over-consumption on a specific fabric. Could be shrinkage worse than the master's value (update the Fabric master). Could be the Spreader Compensation Factor being too tight. Could be a recurring quality issue.
• Single-Batch anomalies. A specific Batch wildly over-consumed. Often a mis-issuance, a defect-heavy cut, or a recording error. Investigate and document.

How to use it weekly

A reasonable rhythm:

• Weekly: scan the dashboard. Flag any Batch with >5% variance. Review with the production manager. Decide which are real signals and which are noise.
• Monthly: roll up variance by Tech Pack. Identify styles where the BOM is consistently wrong; update the Tech Packs.
• Quarterly: roll up variance by fabric. Identify fabrics where the shrinkage or compensation factor is wrong; update the masters.

Each level surfaces a different kind of fix.

What honesty enables

The dashboard is only as useful as the data it reads. If your team has been "fudging" consumption to match the plan (writing exact BOM quantities on every OLE consumption, regardless of what actually happened), the dashboard will show variance = zero across the board — and you'll learn nothing.

Image: The Material Reconciliation dashboard showing five Batches with their variance percentages, two flagged for being outside tolerance.

What to do next

That closes the dashboards. For the tabular reports, see Logistics Reports.