Demanufacturing: When the Whole Is Worth Less Than the Parts
Demanufacturing jobs, harvested parts with provenance, and the Components page where the parts live afterwards.
Some devices are worth more taken apart than sold whole. A laptop with a cracked screen and a perfect motherboard is worth more as a motherboard plus a chassis-as-spares than as a Grade D laptop. A server with one failed drive and seven good ones is worth more as seven drives than as a server. The math is obvious. The problem was that the warehouse didn’t have a workflow for it — so the device sat on the rack until somebody decided to retire it, and the parts went to recycling instead of resale.
The job entity
Demanufacturing is its own job, with its own number (DMF-, handed out per tenant per year like every other document number). Your team opens one against a source asset, picks it from a search across every asset that has not already been consumed, and gets a bill of materials from the template for that category — the components you expect to harvest from a laptop are not the ones you expect from a server. A job moves through queued, in progress, completed or on hold. Each harvested part lands as its own row with a part tag, type, condition, specification, estimated value, and a link back to the source asset. Provenance is preserved: every part can be traced to the laptop it came out of.
Completing a job is supposed to mean the physical work is done and the useful parts are registered. “We opened it and had a look” is not completion. That is curiosity with a screwdriver.
What happens to a part
A harvested part has a status of its own: harvested, testing, passed or failed, then listed, sold or scrapped. A motherboard with bulged capacitors fails and goes to recycling. A drive that failed its checks gets shredded, and for storage parts the component record carries its own data-security state so nobody has to guess whether the SSD in the spares bin still holds a client’s payroll.
The Components page
Parts live on their own page under Core, with two tabs: Inventory — the parts currently tracked as component stock — and Source, the same parts grouped by the device they came out of. Search, type and status filters run across the whole component stock before the page is cut, and the current list exports to CSV. Component detail shows part type, manufacturer, part number, serial, capacity, specification, location, condition, test result, status and estimated value, plus the source asset and the harvesting context. Before the first job has run, the page says where components come from and links to the demanufacturing queue instead of showing an empty table.
Getting a part to market
A part that passed testing can jump from its component detail straight into the existing Market inventory import flow — the same path a refurbished laptop takes, with the same checks. Selling a refurbished motherboard then works the same as selling a refurbished laptop. The buyer doesn’t care about the workflow. The platform does, and that’s the whole point.