Issue, return, reconcile

Material leaves a store the way it arrived: as objects, against a piece of paper. This lesson is about that piece of paper. Who is allowed to ask for cloth, and what the store may promise to somebody else while the cloth waits. At the end of an order you compare what you handed out with what the garments should have taken. That sum almost never comes out level.

Issuing against a cut, not against an order

Meaza's cutting room does not ask for cloth for order GD-5107. It asks for cloth for one cut: a named lay, a named marker, a stated number of plies, on a stated date. That distinction does most of the work in this lesson.

An order is a commercial object that lives for months. A cut is a physical event that happens on a table on a Tuesday. A store that issues against the order hands over rolls and loses sight of them. A store that issues against a cut can say afterwards which rolls went into which lay. Every question in the second half of this lesson is answerable only if it can.

Three rules follow, and none of them costs anything.

1. Issue rolls, not metres. You cannot hand over 4,860.0 m. You hand over 27 rolls whose measured lengths sum to 4,871.3 m, and the issue note carries the roll numbers. Metres on an issue note are a summary of an event. Roll numbers are the event.
2. Issue matched sets. The body lay and the small-parts lay of the same cut leave the store together, from the same shade lot. Otherwise the store has created lesson 1's USD 5,160.96 problem with its own hands.
3. Nothing leaves without a note, including a sample. The 12 m the product-development room takes for a fit sample is 12 m the reconciliation will look for in five months' time.

Committed, available, and the number a merchandiser must never read

On 2 October, with delivery 1 in and delivery 2 still at sea, Dawit asked Tigist a simple question: how much of this poplin is spare? The store system said 26,703.0 m. That number is true and useless.

Available is 13.5% of what the shelf holds. A merchandiser who reads 26,703.0 and books a second order against it has committed the factory to cloth that is already spoken for. Nobody finds out until two cut plans want the same rolls in the same week.

Two words do the work here, and they are worth keeping straight, because systems use them loosely.

• Committed means a specific quantity is reserved for a specific plan. It is still physically on the shelf. It is not yours to give.
• Allocated hard means specific roll numbers are reserved, not just a quantity. This costs more discipline, and it is the only way to hold a shade block together. A soft reservation of 1,800 m will be filled from whatever rolls come to hand on the day. That is exactly how lot D gets into a lay.

Gudumale allocates fabric hard by roll number and trim soft by quantity. The reason is proportionate: a shade block is a garment defect, and a shortage of buttons is a phone call.

What comes back

Cloth returns from the cutting room in three forms, and only two of them are stock.

Those two thresholds are not general truths. They are Gudumale's two marker lengths, and every factory's are different. The general rule is the one underneath: a remnant's usefulness is defined by the shortest marker you own. A store that records remnants without recording that threshold is holding a number nobody can act on.

The reconciliation

GD-5107 closed on 8 March 2028. Here is the whole order in one table. It is the deliverable of this lesson. It takes an afternoon to build if the issue notes carry roll numbers, and a week if they do not.

Two other facts belong beside it. The order was for 48,000 shirts and 47,610 were cut, so it finished 390 short. Completing it needs 631.8 m. Lesson 1 projected 524 short, on the assumption that every delivery would run 1.10% light. The second and third ran better, at 0.97% and 0.75%, and the cutting room came in under its planned allowance. So the real figure is 390. And 708.2 m of cloth was left: 295.6 m never issued, plus the 412.6 m returned. But that 412.6 m is 46 remnants averaging 15.4 m. So the physical cloth exists, and the lays needed to cut it do not come free. Whether to run the last 390 shirts off remnants is a merchandiser's decision about cutting cost, not a store shortage. The store's job was to say plainly that the cloth is there and what shape it is in.

Three stories, one variance

Here is where most factories stop, write "cutting-room waste 1.96%" in a report, and move on. That sentence is a guess dressed up as a measurement. And it is a guess with an interesting property: it names a department that is not the one writing the report.

The variance of 1,509.2 m has at least three complete explanations. Each of them accounts for the whole of it. Each is entirely plausible. And the variance itself cannot distinguish between them.

Gudumale could answer none of the three for GD-5107. The issue notes recorded metres rather than roll numbers. The lay records recorded plies rather than metres. And nobody had recomputed the standard against the sizes actually cut. So the correct entry in the closing report is not "cutting-room waste USD 4,301.22". It is "variance USD 4,301.22, cause unknown", followed by the three changes that would make the next one answerable. Only one of them costs anything at all.

Build my end-of-order material reconciliation, and then refuse to tell me the cause of the variance until the evidence supports one.

I will give you: the quantity invoiced by the supplier, the quantity my store measured in, the quantity issued to cutting, the quantity returned from cutting, the units actually produced, and the standard consumption a unit with the marker and size ratio it was built on.

Build the reconciliation as a single table, line by line, from invoiced down to standard. The variance is the closing line, in quantity, as a percentage of standard, and in money at my material price. Show the short measure against invoice separately from the variance. They are different failures and they get confused constantly.

Then give me at least three complete explanations for the variance, each of which accounts for ALL of it. Express each one as a number I could go and check: extra consumption per ply or per lay, an understated standard in millimetres a garment, and material issued but never converted, in whole rolls or cartons. For each one, name the specific record that would confirm or eliminate it.

Then the rule I actually want from you. Do not attribute the variance to any of them. Tell me the cause is unknown until one of those records has been read. Say which of the three has the largest consequence if true — usually an understated standard, because that one is still happening on every order I quote. If I press you for a single cause, or if I have already written waste in the report, push back and ask which record I read.

Finally, list the changes that would make the NEXT variance answerable, marking which of them cost money and which are just a different thing written on the same piece of paper.