Product Lifecycle Management (PLM): Built on the Whole Recipe
Traditional PLM stores an approved formula. How it is actually made lives in a spreadsheet or a binder beside it: sub-recipes, order of addition, mixing and cure conditions. So one base formula becomes ten SKUs nobody can version, a single ingredient swap takes weeks to reach every spec it touches, and the document on the line may not be the one that was approved.
A flat ingredient list gives you cost and total percentages, which is what costing and regulatory declarations need. It cannot tell an operator how to make the product, or tell change control which sub-recipe a substituted ingredient sits in. Uncountable holds both: the recipe and the process, on one record, versioned together. Quantities behave as proportions that have to balance rather than parts you count, and the development history behind each version stays attached to it, so you can see not just what changed, but how that version came to exist.
After approval, the record keeps moving. It carries its bill of materials, documents and approvals through defined stage gates with reviewer sign-off. An ingredient change triggers an impact assessment, where-used shows every product that change affects, and once cleared it reaches QC specs and manufacturing together. Regulatory attributes travel with the formulation rather than sitting in a separate file, and the approved spec can publish to ERP. Adoption does not require replacing your LIMS: a one-time load of active product data plus targeted integration is often enough.
Your product is a recipe. Your system of record should be too.
FAQs
How Uncountable manages the product lifecycle for formulated products: what sits on the product record, how multi-level bills of materials and sub-recipes are held, how change control and where-used work, how stage gates and approvals run, and how the approved spec reaches ERP, quality and manufacturing.
A traditional PLM was designed for assemblies, where quantities are parts you count and a flattened bill of materials is enough. Formulated products need proportions that balance, sub-recipes, and the process conditions that make the product repeatable. Uncountable holds all of that on one versioned record, along with the development work behind each version.
No. A one-time load of active product data plus targeted integration is often enough to get started, and the PLM suite shares a data model with the R&D and Quality suites if you later want them on the same platform.
Change control runs an impact assessment and routes multi-level approval. Where-used resolves every product the ingredient touches, so the scope of the change is visible before it is approved rather than discovered afterwards.
Chemicals and coatings, adhesives, food and beverage, and personal care, pharmacology, specialty chemicals, advanced materials; anywhere the product is a formulation rather than an assembly.
