can interact with other manufacturer and shipper systems to material shipments from warehouse s to the user the system also may schedule shipment of raw materials from different warehouse sites to a product blending and manufacturing site where processing of the raw materials into a completed product can take place the completed product can then be shipped to the user in some cases a user may not want to use one of the server 39 s preexisting paint recipe or the existing recipes may not have the characteristics required by the user such users may benefit from a custom paint formulation service provided by the server the custom paint formulation service may allow the user to enter a starting point recipe or to query for a recipe to be used as a starting point the operation of the paint formulation service may begin with a data gathering stage in the data gathering state the server can collect target characteristic information from a user this target characteristic information may then be compared to known product process and formulations characteristics of products produced using recipes stored in the database 125 this comparison can include weighing different target characteristics against the known characteristics to determine a ranking of recipes for example binding and opacity properties specified by a user as target characteristics can be compared to the binding and opacity properties of paints produced using the known recipes this comparison can be done e g by measuring a difference between user specified target characteristics and known characteristics to determine an overall ranking score for a particular formulation this scoring process can be repeated for a number.