Hello everyone! Welcome back to the NumberCruncher Blog! I hope you got a chance to check out our previous post about Lot/Serial numbers within the All Orders software. If your company keep's track of Lot/Serial number's and you would like to learn more about this feature, please check out last week's post below. Today, I would like to talk about the productions side of thing's. I would like to briefly go over our Work Order feature.

If there's a production aspect of your business, and you're creating new items out of singular components (raw material's), then you're likely to use our key feature, the Work Order. Work Orders include to major aspects of production: Part and Processes. Every Work Order will consist of a number of Steps/Operations. This will describe the labor and manufacturing involved with producing the item in question.

Step/Operations can contain one or more components. These items will go into producing the finished good. This is a great way to keep track of inventory of your raw materials/components. When you start the Work Order process, each step will have a status, which can have the following values:

Waiting: Components need to be allocated. You can enter quantities directly into the Allocated column of the Component List, or use ‘Pick All’ or ‘Pick Select’ to automatically allocate components based on available quantities.  All components must be allocated before status can be changed to ‘In Production,’ unless you have the ‘Allow status forcing’ option selected in Preferences.

Ready: All components have been allocated and the step is ready to be placed into production.

In Production: The step is currently is being worked on.

Finished: Production is finished for the step.

You can also assign time to these steps. Maybe you are adding labor cost, and you want to be able to track how long it takes to complete each step so you can add the correct amount to labor.

You will aslo have a number of Work Order related commands on the toolbar. You can get to these commands by the activities drop down menu. Let me go over them with you:

Finish all: This will automatically finish all steps, provided there's enough allocated inventory. Additionally, you must have Status Skipping enabled in your Work Order Preferences for this command to work.

Restart: Starts the Work Order over from scratch, setting the Produced field back to zero and resetting all steps back to Ready status.

Split: If you have already completed at least one assembly (and have the inventory available to produce the remaining total ordered), you can split off the remaining unfinished assemblies into a new Work Order so that you can bill for the ones you've already produced.

Pick Selected: For the selected step, All Orders automatically fills the Allocated column with available stock.

Pick All: For every step in the work order, All Orders automatically fills the Allocated column with available stock.

Flatten: In the case of a multi-level Bill of Materials, you might want to do a single Work Order, listing all the components of the entire hierarchy as though it were a single Bill of Materials. This button allows you to do that. In order for the Flatten function to drill down to the components of the sub-assembly, the sub-assembly must be parked as a ‘Phantom BOM’.

Drill Down: In the case of a multi-level Bill of Materials,  Drill Down will to automatically create the chain of work orders for the top level item's sub-assemblies.   All work orders that are part of the chain will have the same Drill Down Ref being the work order # of the top level item.   You can filter the work order list to by Drill Down Ref to view only the work orders in the drill down chain.

Create Linked Purchase Orders: Opens the Reorder Analysis tool, allowing you to place orders for components required directly from the Work Order.

Create Linked Work Orders: Allows you to create related work orders in order to produce components that are sub-assemblies.