With freight costs skyrocketing it makes sense to cut out as much unnecessary movement of resources. Manufacturing your intermediate goods at the same factories as your final goods helps you to avoid a lot of unnecessary shipping.
What is an Intermediate Good?
The simplest definition is a good produced by factories and consumed in factories. It is neither a finished good nor a raw material.
How do you effectively in-line intermediate goods?
Consider the size of factory you have available. If you are working with normal size (3 products) you probably will only have room for one intermediate good in order to get good use out of it. For example, a factory glass, wine, and grape juice makes the bottles in-house for the wine and grape juice. If you have a large factory (6 products), however, you might consider making the citric acid for the grape juice at the same factory as well as some other products.
Choose your products carefully. You get the most for your money by producing the maximum number of output products for the minimum number of input products. You also get a productivity bonus for large and extra large factories so make sure to consider this as well.
Another thing to consider is how much of the intermediate is required by the factory each day. Ordinarily 1 day’s production exceeds consumption of that output by even 2 or 3 products, but if you aren’t careful you might not be able to fulfill the need for the intermediate completely. If you find you are bottlenecked, it might be worth spinning up a small factory to boost output or simply remove one of the intermediate consumers in favor of something else.
Here are a few factory layouts to think about:
normal 1
- flour (int)
- bread
- cakes
normal 2
- glass (int)
- wine
- grape juice
large 1
- glass (int)
- citric acid (int)
- wine
- grape juice
- milk bottle
- yogurt
large 2
- corn syrup (int)
- sugar (int)
- chewing gum
- ice cream
- yogurt
- corn flakes
