The most important setup decision in a manufacturing system is not the chart of accounts or the user roles. It is the list of item categories, and specifically two fields on each one: its type and its unit. Get those right before you import a single item and inventory, production and procurement will behave for years. Get them wrong and you will be correcting records for months, usually after a stock count has already been signed off on bad numbers.
Three parts to every category
A category in Aourix has three parts, and it helps to think about them separately.
- A code, which is locked. Codes exist so integrations, reports and history never break when someone renames something. Nobody on the floor needs to see them.
- A display label, which is entirely yours. Call the category whatever your floor actually calls it, in whatever language your team speaks: Bahan Baku, Soap Noodle Premium, Alkalis, whatever is written on the whiteboard. Labels can change without consequence.
- A type and a unit, which tell the system how to treat every item inside the category. The type drives calculations, which pickers appear on screens, and what gets validated. The unit is inherited by every item in the category, so kilograms stay kilograms and tonnes stay tonnes.
The label is for people. The type and unit are for the system. Confusing the two is where most bad setups begin: a plant creates twenty beautifully named categories and leaves half of them without a type, and everything downstream silently guesses.
Why the type has to come from a fixed list
Your label can be anything. The type cannot. It has to be one of the standard types, because that is what the rest of the platform reasons about. A raw material behaves differently from packaging, which behaves differently from a finished good or a semi-finished intermediate. Production consumes raw materials and produces finished or semi-finished goods; dispatch ships finished goods in packaging; procurement buys raw materials and packaging. Every one of those rules keys off the type.
This is also what makes a category useful to an assistant. When Genie is asked what is short for next week's batches, it can answer because "raw material" means the same thing on every item that carries it.
The unit is inherited, on purpose
Setting the unit at the category level, rather than item by item, is a deliberate constraint. It means every item in Alkalis is in the same unit, every formula line that references an alkali is in that unit, and every stock movement for those items is in that unit. Mixed units inside a category are the classic source of the "we have 40 in stock" conversation where nobody knows whether 40 is kilograms, bags or drums.
If two groups of items genuinely need different units, that is a signal they belong in different categories, or in subcategories under a category with a shared unit.
Subcategories: one level finer, not more categories
Subcategories sit underneath a category and let you go one level finer without multiplying categories. Use them for the distinctions that matter when someone is picking stock, not the ones that matter when someone is reading a report: grades, origins, pack formats. A soap noodle category might have subcategories for 80/20 and 90/10 blends; a packaging category might split cartons by size.
The test is simple. If the distinction changes how the item is planned, costed or shipped, it is probably a category with its own type and unit. If it only changes which bin you walk to, it is a subcategory.
The counter to aim for
The category screen keeps a running count: how many categories have a type, how many have a unit. Aim for both at one hundred percent before you import items. An untyped or unitless category is the single most common reason a production order or a stock count looks wrong later, and it is far cheaper to fix on an empty category than on one with three hundred items and a year of movements behind it.
The ten-minute checklist
Before importing anything:
- Write the categories the way your floor speaks, in your team's language.
- Give every category one of the standard types.
- Give every category a unit, and check that everything you intend to put inside it really is measured that way.
- Add subcategories only for pick-time distinctions.
- Check the counter reads all typed, all with a unit.
Ten minutes here saves weeks. Every stock count, every batch and every purchase order you raise afterwards inherits these decisions.