About Margin Changing Over Time

In some cases, the product margin, or the amount of profit that one unit of that particular product yields, changes over time. For example, consider a company that produces water bottles. If consumers start buying more bottled water versus carbonated soft drinks, the profit that a single bottle yields might increase.

In this case, in any Production Profile record that defines water bottle production from a particular unit, you would want to change the value of the Default Margin to represent the current margin at that time.

The value of the Default Margin in the Margins subsection is copied to the Margin field in all new Production Data records. For instance, if on July 1 the value in the Default Margin field is 5.00, new Production Data records that are created on or after July 1 will contain the value 5 in the Margin field. If, however, on July 16 you change the value in the Default Margin field to 6.00, any new Production Data records that are created on or after July 16 will contain the value 6 in their Margin field.

The Production Data records are created automatically when you access the Production Data workspace. The number of records that are created depends on the day on which you access the page and the planning period of the Production Plan record that you selected when you accessed the workspace.

For example, suppose the planning period in a Production Plan record is July 1 through July 31. If you were to access the Production Data workspace for that Production Plan record for the first time on July 15, fifteen Production Data records would be created (one for each day between July 1 and July 15). Each of those records would contain the same value in the Margin field because they were all created at the same time.

If you were to increase the value in the Default Margin field on July 16 and access the Production Data workspace again on July 16, one new Production Data record would be created to represent July 16, and the value in its Margin field would be the updated value of the Default Margin field in the Margins subsection.