Five models, and what each is for.
Discrete — distinct units, work orders, countable output. The default, and the most common. Process — batches, formulas, co-products and by-products: chemicals, food, pharmaceuticals. Project-driven — work tied to a project with costs collected against it: engineer-to-order, capital equipment. Contract manufacturing — production performed by a third party on your behalf. Outside processing — one or more operations sent to a supplier mid-route: plating, heat treatment, painting.
How to tell which you are looking at, and it is one question: ask what comes out of a production run. One countable thing? Discrete. A quantity of material, plus unavoidable by-products? Process. Something unique against a customer contract? Project. That question cuts through a great deal of vocabulary, and you can ask it in a workshop without sounding like you are reading from a list.
The mixed case is very common, and learners over-complicate it. A discrete manufacturer with one plating operation sent outside is discrete with outside processing. That is all — no second model, no second design, no specialist. Say it plainly, because the instinct on seeing two things in the list is to conclude you have two implementations.
What the decision commits you to: different setup, different transactions, different costing, and different skills on the project team — which is the one that shows up in a resourcing plan rather than a design document.
And the scoping consequence. Process manufacturing is a materially different implementation. So when the client says "we also make a few batch products", find out how many and how important before agreeing it is a small addition. A few, once a quarter, for internal use, is a scope exclusion. A few that happen to be forty per cent of revenue is a second project.
This course teaches discrete with outside processing, said plainly, with pointers to where you would go deeper for the others. Honest scoping builds more trust than pretending to cover everything — and a learner who discovers late that process manufacturing was never covered will trust nothing else either.