Spare Parts
Needles, loopers, feed dogs, presser feet, bobbins, belts, motors, blades. Every plant carries them; most track them badly, because they sit in the same Item table as fabric and finished garments and get lost among them.
GarmentFlow gives them their own corner of the item tree and connects them to the machines they fit.
The item group tree
A fresh site is seeded with a Machine Part item group and seven part families under it:
- Needles
- Loopers & Hooks
- Feed Dogs & Plates
- Presser Feet
- Bobbins
- Belts & Motors
- Cutting Blades
The group is recorded in GarmentFlow Settings as the machine-parts group. Everything under it is treated as a spare part. Point the setting elsewhere and the whole feature follows; leave it unset and the feature stays dormant.
Rename the families or add your own — the setting reads the group and all its descendants, so a new sub-group is picked up with no further configuration.
Compatibility
An Item under the parts tree gets a Compatible Machine Types table: which machine types this part fits, chosen from the same Maintenance Type list the machines use.
The Item form is aware of the tree. Open a part and the machine-part fields appear while the garment and style fields hide; open a fabric and the reverse happens. You are never scrolling past fields that don't apply.
Filling in compatibility is what turns "we have needles somewhere" into "this machine takes these needles, and we have 40".
The spare-parts list on a machine
Open a machine's drawer and its Spare parts tab is built from two independent signals:
- Declared compatible — parts whose Compatible Machine Types include this machine's type.
- Actually used — parts consumed on this machine's Asset Repairs.
Each row shows whether the part is compatible, used, or both, plus how many times it has been consumed, the quantity and value consumed, and the current stock on hand. Rows are ordered by relevance: declared-and-used first, then used, then declared.
That ordering is deliberate. The parts a machine has actually eaten are better evidence than the parts someone once said it takes.
Restocking
Parts are ordinary stock items, so restocking is ordinary ERPNext: raise a Material Request from the Maintenance sidebar or the launch pad, and it flows through the usual purchase cycle. Nothing about spare parts bypasses procurement.
Consumption is recorded where it happens — on the Asset Repair, in its consumed-items table. That is what feeds the usage statistics on the machine, and what puts repair cost against the right machine.
Set reorder levels on the parts you cannot run without. A stitching line waiting on a €2 looper is the most expensive €2 in the plant.
What to do next
See Maintenance reports for how parts spend and downtime read together.