Planning and the shop floor

Where

Manufacturing → Work Centers

Plan

Professional and above

Permission

Manufacturing → Work Center

Feature

Modules → Manufacturing

Set your expectations first

These screens record your plan. They do not make one.

Nothing checks capacity, nothing sequences jobs, nothing generates a work order from a plan, and there is no Gantt chart or calendar anywhere. Every row is typed by a person.

Used as a shared diary, they work. Expected to plan production for you, they will disappoint.

How to set up a work centre

1. Go to Manufacturing → Work Centers and click New Work Centre.
2. Type the Name — the only required field — and a Code.
3. Pick the Type: Machine, Assembly, Quality Control, Packaging or Warehouse.
4. Set the Location.
5. Save.

How to set up a machine

1. Go to Manufacturing → Machines and click New Machine.
2. Type the Name and the Machine No.
3. Pick the Work Centre it belongs to and the Status: Available, In Use, Maintenance, Breakdown or Retired.
4. Add the Manufacturer, Model, Serial No. and Purchase Date.
5. Save.

Capacity and the rate fields do nothing

Capacity on a work centre is stored and displayed and never checked. No schedule warns you about overloading it, and no report uses it. Anything you enter at zero or below is quietly turned into 1.

Labour Rate and Overhead Rate on the work centre, and Hourly Rate on the machine, are equally unwired. Work order costing uses figures you enter separately on the work order itself, never these.

How to create a production plan

1. Go to Manufacturing → Production Plans and click New plan.
2. Type a Name and set the Start date and End date.
3. Under Planned items, add a row per product: the Product and the Planned qty. You can scan products in.
4. If the work order already exists, pick it in the Work order column.
5. Save.
6. To move it along, use Set status on the row menu: Approved, In progress, Completed or Cancelled.

Approving a plan does not create any work orders

There is no generate button and no endpoint behind one. Approving a plan sets its status and stamps who approved it. Nothing else happens.

The real order of work is the other way round: create the work orders first, then come back and point the plan’s lines at them using the Work order column — or leave that column empty and treat the plan as a target list.

A plan can only be edited while it is a draft

The Edit action stays visible after you approve one, and clicking it just shows an error. Get the plan right before you approve it.

Plans cannot be printed, exported or sent.

How to schedule a job

A plan is what and how much over a period. A schedule is which job, on which work centre, on which dates. Nothing links the two.

1. Go to Manufacturing → Production Schedules and click New schedule.
2. Pick the Work order — required — and the Work center.
3. Set the Priority, the Start date and the End date.
4. Set the Status: Scheduled, In progress, Completed, Rescheduled or Cancelled.
5. Save.

Nothing checks for clashes

You can book two jobs onto one work centre at the same time, or schedule beyond its capacity, and nothing objects. There is no overlap detection and no sequencing.

The list is a table, not a timeline — plan the order in your head and record it here.

How to log time against a job

1. Go to Manufacturing → Operation Time Logs and click New time log.
2. Pick the Work order, then the Operation it exposes.
3. Pick the Type: Run, Setup, Idle, Break or Maintenance.
4. Pick the Employee and enter the Start time and End time.
5. Save.

Time logs feed nothing, and cannot record which day

Nothing reads these logs — not costing, not the efficiency figures, not any report. The source says why: a log stores only a time of day, with no date at all, so an overnight shift cannot be represented and the system cannot tell which day the work happened.

The date filter on the screen therefore filters by when the row was typed, not when the work was done. The Operation column also shows a raw internal identifier rather than a name.

For costing, use the Labour dialog on the work order itself — that is the table the reports actually read.

There is no clock-in, no kiosk and no timer. Times are typed in afterwards by a supervisor.

How to log machine maintenance

1. Go to Manufacturing → Machines and open the machine’s row menu.
2. Click Maintenance. The history is at the top, the entry form beneath.
3. Pick the Type: Preventive, Corrective, Predictive or Breakdown.
4. Set Performed By, the Maintenance Date and Next Scheduled.
5. Enter the Cost and Downtime (min), and a Description.
6. Save. The form clears so you can add another.

Logging maintenance does not update the machine

The machine’s Last Maintenance and Next Maintenance dates are not changed by logging maintenance. They only ever change when somebody edits the machine record directly.

That matters because the dashboard’s upcoming-maintenance count reads those dates — so it silently goes stale unless you update the machine by hand as well.

There are also no reminders. Nothing alerts you that maintenance is due.

Logs cannot be edited or deleted once added. For a list across all machines, use Reports → Manufacturing Reports → Machine Maintenance — the Machine Maintenance Logs menu item just reopens the Machines list.

Reports

The menu label does not match the screen

Manufacturing → Production Reports opens a report titled Work Order Summary. It is useful — planned against produced quantity, status and actual cost per job — but it is not production reports.

The snapshots are under Production report snapshots.

To create a snapshot:

1. Go to Manufacturing → Production report snapshots and click Generate report.
2. Pick the Location, the Period start and Period end.
3. Submit.

Total production, Total scrap and Efficiency % are genuinely computed from your completed outputs and scrap records. Two columns are not:

• Total rework is hardcoded to zero — there is no rework table behind it, so it will always read 0 regardless of what happened.
• Unplanned downtime comes from the work-centre efficiency figures, which are typed in by hand.

No job generates snapshots. One exists only because somebody clicked Generate.

Efficiency snapshots are hand-typed, not measured

The Efficiency action on a work centre has a Generate button, which is a misnomer — it asks you to type in the planned, actual, idle and downtime hours yourself. All it calculates is the two percentages from the numbers you supplied.

Offline

None of this works offline — the shop floor cannot log time or maintenance without a connection.

Related

• Work orders
• Recipes and routings