Downstream in manufacturing refers to processes that occur later on in a production sequence or production line. Viewing a company "from order to cash" might have high-level processes such as

Marketing Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to emph ...

Sales Sales are activities related to selling or the number of goods sold in a given targeted time period. The delivery of a service for a cost is also considered a sale. The seller, or the provider of the goods or services, completes a sale in ...

Order Entry An order management system, or OMS, is a computer software system used in a number of industries for order entry and processing. Electronic commerce and catalogers Orders can be received from businesses, consumers, or a mix of both, depending on th ...

Manufacturing Manufacturing is the creation or production of goods with the help of equipment, labor, machines, tools, and chemical or biological processing or formulation. It is the essence of secondary sector of the economy. The term may refer to ...

, Packaging,

Shipping Freight transport, also referred as ''Freight Forwarding'', is the physical process of transporting commodities and merchandise goods and cargo. The term shipping originally referred to transport by sea but in American English, it has been ...

Invoicing An invoice, bill or tab is a commercial document issued by a seller to a buyer relating to a sale transaction and indicating the products, quantities, and agreed-upon prices for products or services the seller had provided the buyer. Payment ...

. Each of these could be deconstructed into many sub-processes and supporting processes. The

process consists of such sub-processes as

Design A design is a plan or specification for the construction of an object or system or for the implementation of an activity or process or the result of that plan or specification in the form of a prototype, product, or process. The verb ''to design' ...

, Tooling,

Inventory Management Field inventory management commonly known as inventory management is the function of understanding the stock mix of a company and the different demands on that stock. The demands are influenced by both external and internal factors and are balan ...

, Receiving, Assembly, and others. The products being manufactured are created in a sequence of processes. Any process occurring after another is considered to be downstream.

See also