VicinityChem, chemical manufacturing software, tracks production at the formula or recipe level instead of measuring your production with a traditional bill of material. When your company uses a formula, VicinityChem will provide the guidelines for the master recipe while allowing you to easily document what you actually used — which may be different than the standard formula or which may have used a substituted input. This detailed tracking gives you more flexibility than traditional manufacturing software systems.

To achieve the same results with a system that uses a bill of material as the foundation, you would need to set up a new job for every possible combination of items or ingredients that make a product. And you would need to set up a new job for every bulk production run.

This requires additional data entry, which wastes time and often leads to errors. It also requires more manual accounting. For example, if you are scaling up a batch for a bulk production run while recording the results across individual logs, you would need to divide your results manually, you lose the ability to accurately trace lots, and there is no longer an accurate way to capture true overall yields.