Production Orders Overview
A production order tracks the assembly or disassembly of products at one of your Shopify locations. Unlike purchase orders and transfer orders, production orders have no supplier, no currency, no shipments, and no receiving workflow — they track what is built or broken down, and how much.
In This Section
- Creating Production Orders — Two ways to create a production order, required fields, and what happens on save
- Managing Production Orders — Start, complete, and cancel production orders
- Shopify Sync — How and when Synplex pushes inventory adjustments to Shopify when quantities are produced
The Production Order Lifecycle
draft → in_progress → completed ↘ cancelled (from draft or in_progress only)
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| draft | Being built; all fields editable; no Shopify sync occurs |
| in_progress | Order started; quantityProduced is editable; Shopify sync fires on each save |
| completed | Production closed; quantityPlanned reconciled to quantityProduced; read-only |
| cancelled | Order voided; components deleted if cancelled from draft, preserved if from in_progress |
Two Ways to Start a Production Order
1. Manually from Production Orders Navigate to Production Orders and click Create new production order. Set the type, location, and internal reference, then add components by selecting BOMs.
2. From the Inventory Table
Multi-select product rows in the inventory table, click
Add to Production Order, and choose Create new production order.
Synplex passes the selected items pre-populated into the components table
via sessionStorage.
Key Concepts
| Concept | Description |
|---|---|
| Type | assembly (build finished goods from components) or disassembly (break finished goods back into components) |
| Location | The single Shopify location where production takes place |
| Components | The product variants involved in the production, each with a planned quantity, produced quantity, and unit of measure |
| BOM | Bill of Materials — defines the relationship between a finished-goods variant and its component variants. Components are added to a production order by selecting BOMs |
| Shopify Sync | When enabled, each change to quantityProduced fires an inventoryAdjustQuantities mutation against Shopify's available bucket for both the output variant and all BOM components |
Assembly vs. Disassembly
| Assembly | Disassembly | |
|---|---|---|
| Output variant stock | Increases | Decreases |
| Component variant stock | Decreases (consumed) | Increases (returned) |
| Use case | Build kits or finished goods from raw materials | Break finished goods or kits back into components |
How Production Orders Differ from Transfer and Purchase Orders
| Production Orders | Transfer Orders | Purchase Orders | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stock movement | Within one location (BOM components ↔ finished goods) | Between two of your locations | From an external supplier |
| Supplier | None | None | Required |
| Shipments | None | Yes — full receiving workflow | Yes — full receiving workflow |
| Currency / payments | None | None | Full payment record lifecycle |
| Shopify sync | inventoryAdjustQuantities on available bucket | Shopify Inventory Transfer API | Inventory adjustment (incoming / available / damaged buckets) |
| Supply plan regeneration on complete | No | No | Yes |
| Cancellation sync to Shopify | No | Yes (TRANSFER_CANCEL) | No |
Support
For help with production orders, contact support@synplex.dev.