Lyannard

Something I've been thinking about while building in the small-batch production space (bakeries, candle and soap makers, caterers): almost every tool in this category, including most of what I looked at before building my own, treats "inventory" and "capacity" as the same problem. They're not.

Knowing you have 60 eggs, 8kg of flour, and 1.5kg of butter is an inventory fact. Knowing that translates to 15 cakes, not the 25 a customer just asked for, and that butter is the actual constraint, not flour, is a capacity fact. Most small producers are doing that second translation in their head, every single order, and it's the part that actually determines whether they can say yes.

I ended up building Makeable to handle that translation specifically, rather than trying to be a full inventory or accounting system, because I kept seeing people abandon heavier tools the moment they had to maintain a chart of accounts just to answer a yes/no question (usemakeable.com, for anyone curious what it looks like in practice).

Curious how others here think about this distinction in other domains. Do you see the same "we track the data but not the decision" gap outside of physical production? I'd guess it shows up in capacity planning for services and even dev team throughput, not just materials.