01
What have we got?
Exactly, and by location.
Not forty litres of milk. Thirty in the cold room, ten at the canning line, two out with a team and five hundred millilitres owed back.
What Bala is for
Four questions, answered in seconds
The information needed to answer them already exists. It is on the shelves, in the recipes, and in the head of whoever has been doing this longest.
02
What can we make with it?
And what is stopping it being more.
Resolved through every level of every recipe, naming the single ingredient that is limiting it. Knowing you can make 280 is useful. Knowing it is the milk is actionable.
03
What can we promise?
Net of what you already owe other customers.
The honest answer is not what is on the shelf. Promise the same ingredients twice and you fail two customers instead of declining one.
04
What do we buy, and when is it ready?
A shopping list with a date on it.
Short 48 litres of milk, which is four containers, from this supplier, three days away. So the order is ready on the eighth, and you can say so on the phone.
Answering them is half of it. The other half is that once an order is accepted, the work organises itself.
The error most factories are making without knowing
One order. Three products. One quantity of milk.
“We can make 280 of the first.”
True.
“We can make 200 of the second.”
Also true.
Both wrong at the same time, because each answer quietly assumed it had all of the milk.
Bala works the answer out for the order as a whole, netted through every recipe to raw ingredients in one pass. It is the clearest thing a spreadsheet cannot fix.
The number that matters
Why the honest answer is not what is on the shelf
Three figures, the same size as each other, because none of them is more important and making one bigger would tell the factory which to trust.
On hand
80
cans
Finished, countable today
Can make
280
cans
Limited by milk
Free to promise
310
cans
50 already committed
And five litres of milk on the shelf is not five litres you can sell. Several products draw on the same ingredient, so Bala tracks what is on hand, what is committed, and what is genuinely available. Every makeable figure is built on the last one.
Start with two weeks
A short conversation, then two weeks on your floor. At the end you have a fixed price and your factory's knowledge written down, and you owe nothing further.