Use of Processes
Hello, VF team! I'm deep in the woods of converting Basis to use VF which is turning out to be a fairly large restructure. This is giving me the opportunity to take the things I know it needs, throw out the things it doesn't, and refine it all in the context of VF. I suspect there will be a few iterations of this, but have some questions on how this might be modeled.
The first question of probably many is regarding the idea of cost buckets. Cost buckets allow a company to split up costs (for instance inventory vs operational) and assign the costs to products or services proportionally to each other. So a product that uses a lot of inventory might get assigned 80% of the inventory costs, and all products share the operational costs (and remainder of the inventory costs) equally.
I'm realizing that a VF Process might be great for this, because it has inputs/outputs and economic events (like ordering inventory or worker labor). This seems to make logical sense given my understanding of a process as a sort of grouping of events. Is my understanding here correct?
If a Process does make sense here, then I have a follow up question. One of the core concepts in Basis is tracking resources (which are defined differently than VF and can be thought of almost as "raw materials"). However, one of its goals is to model transformations of these raw materials, such that "crude oil" might be a resource but is transformed into "gasoline" and "diesel" such that the oil is used up and the resulting resources replace it by some proportion. I originally thought of using a Process to model this kind of transformation. Does it make sense to use a Process in this context when also using it in the context of cost bucketing?
I guess my question boils down to: what if a transformative process (refining crude oil) needs to have several cost-bucketing processes within it? Would the refining process actually be a scenario in this case since many processes can live under it? Or perhaps each company has separate sets of processes: transformative and cost-tracking? I like the idea of transformative processes and cost-tracking processes being the same but I'm wondering if this causes limitations for cost tracking. Or maybe this limitation is actually desired because these transformative processes would essentially be pre-defined and fairly limited in scope.
Thanks!