Keyline distinguishes between three types of outsourcing, depending on how much of a product is manufactured externally.
On the “Outsourcing” tab, you can choose from the following options:
Outsource everything
If you have products produced and shipped entirely externally, you can use “Outsourcing” to have a supplier handle the entire production process. Keyline then plans no further actions, such as production tasks or material orders.Keyline marks the product as completed as soon as it is released for production.
You can manually edit the product description at order level at any time to include specifications and product details. These appear on the quote, the order confirmation and the invoice.
Outsource everything but logistics
The supplier handles the entire production process, while you take care of packing and shipping. In this mode, Keyline creates production tasks for packing and shipping only.
Outsource specific production tasks
Sometimes individual production tasks need to be outsourced because they cannot be carried out in-house.
To make this as easy as possible, you can change the mode of each individual production task on the “Outsourcing” tab in Keyline.
The “Outsource specific production tasks” option lists all the production tasks created for the product. Select the task you want, enter its expected duration and specify the supplier, price and expected waste for each quantity tier. You can select several production tasks.
Important: waste is always calculated based on the output goods:
• For printing, waste is based on sheets,
• for perfect binding, on whole products,
• for packing, on complete packaging units.
In the costing overview under “Prices”, outsourcing costs are listed as a separate item.
If you always want to outsource certain production tasks, go to the admin area under Templates/Production tasks and select “Create as outsourced by default”.
You can also specify the expected arrival and completion dates for the external supplier, so Keyline can take them into account when planning.
In your outsourcing overview, you can adjust the date at any time.
You can enter outsourcing costs in euros or use formulas. Formulas and entered values are always copied when you duplicate a product, so you can see exactly what you allowed for outsourcing last time.
In this example, we use a price of 25 cents per sheet and add a flat fee of 25 euros.
You can also upload any number of PDF documents, up to 10 MB per file, to store quotes from your supplier, for example. These files are available to you at any time.
