Parent and child cards automation

Question

Hi, i have created a production board for our manufacturing workshop.

Its working well at the beginning of the cards journey but i run into problems when it reaches a certain list. This is because the card needs to split. We make furniture.

The card is at "production book level" or works order. What i mean is it is one card with all of the orders details. Eg 10x wardrobes, 10x TV unit. 10x Headboard. 20x Bedside Table. They are currently listed in the cards description.

Every email is in a standard format but obviously every order is different.

For more clarity

List 1: Optimise.

Card is generated via email to board setting. It has lots of automations already running eg status labels, auto checklists etc. The description contains whats in the order. (we also have other documents offline to Trello to support this in more detail.)

List 2: Clear to cut

Card moves here when optimised.

List 3: Cut

Card still ok at this point as all items in the card have to be cut.

List 4: Edge List 5: CNC

Starts getting complicated here. Card needs to split. No all items will be edged or cnc.

Also at list "Cut" we may have cut say wardrobes so in theory the wardrobe part could progress.

List 6: Assemble

Starts getting more complicated again. Some items need to go to upholstery some go to paint shop. (These also have lists)

Id like to be able to start with a production book as one card but then split it off.

I know you can have parent and child card with powerups that i have experimented with but the one i tried (think it was Epic) is very manual. You have to type all this this in and create the child cards manually.

Is there a way i can automate this so when i reach a certain list and i want to create the child cards i can press a button in that card and it somehow creates the child cards automatically from my description?

Im happy to jump on a Teams call to explain in more detail if someone can help me!!

milynnus · Answer

@Curtis Furniture

The technique that I used with my clients uses cardlinks to express the relationships between cards. Typically the parent card will have checklist(s) where the item name is the cardlink to the child card. The child card will have as it first attachment the cardlink to the parent card so that find last will always find the parent card. This is particularly useful for automation. Varies automation methods can be deployed to set up the relationships include a drag and drop from one checklist to another. This approach is not unique to any process or use case. I have used it for up to grandparent-parent-child setup for a real estate client that had a well defined SOP and it allowed workflow status to flow up stream and across boards.

Germán Morales · Answer

Hi @Curtis Furniture, the button you're picturing actually exists natively, no Power-Up needed. The trick is that the items have to live in a checklist on the card, one per line, rather than only in the description. Then a card button can run "for each checklist item, convert it to a linked card in list X". One press turns every line into its own card and leaves a link back to the works order card, which is exactly the parent/child split you want. The Epic Power-Up felt manual because it wasn't using this conversion. There's a good write-up of the exact button here: Trello Subtasks with Butler

The catch is the bit that decides your whole approach: Butler can't read a free text description and build that checklist for you. It only acts on checklist items that already exist, it won't parse the order text into lines. So you've got two realistic routes. Either the items get into a checklist at intake (even pasted in as a checklist instead of into the description), and the button handles the splitting from there. Or, if you want the parsing of each different order automated too, that part goes out to Make or Zapier: they read the incoming email, break it into line items by your standard format, and create the cards or the checklist through Trello's API. That external step is the only way to automate the variable part, which is why Arkadiusz asked to see your order layout.

Sending them down different paths afterwards, edge and CNC versus upholstery and paint, is a separate layer of label based rules once the child cards exist. Worth getting the split working first, then building the routing on top.

Arkadiusz Wroblewski · Answer

Hello @Curtis Furniture

Could you share a sanitized example of the order text? Seeing its structure will help determine if you can use native Trello Automation or if you'll need an external tool like Make or Zapier.

Also, do all child cards follow the same production workflow, or does each product type require a different route?

Best,

Arkadiusz 🤠☀️