Work Orders

To create a work order, head to the Main Menu> Manufacturing > Work Orders.

Then click the New Work Order button in the top right.

You can also create a Work Order directly from a Sales Order using the Generate > Work Order buttons on the toolbar.

Note that you must have manufactured products on the order, otherwise the Work Order button will appear greyed out and you will not be able to select it.

When you create a Work Order this way, the system will create a link between the records so that you can see the Work Order from the Sales Order and vice versa.

Work Order tab on a Sales Order

Sales Order tab on a Work Order

You can also configure your manufacturing settings to automatically create an Outbound Shipment for stock once the Work Order is completed and stock is available.

When creating a new Work Order you’ll be prompted to enter in:

• The BOM that the work order is based on.
• A name for the Work Order (Bakehouse Fudge Brownies).
• The Location for production (e.g. Western Sydney Kitchen).
• Who the order is Assigned To – you can select either a User or a Team here.
• Any Production Notes you might have.

Note that if your BOM is not set as ‘Adjustable’, you will not be able to modify the input or output products, production steps or resources in your Work Order. 

On the right hand column you can choose:

• The Number Of Cycles you’d like to run (e.g. 10 batches). CRM will then automatically calculate and populate the Setup Duration and Cycle Duration fields with information from the BoM.
• You can enter a Start date now if you’d like (you can also set this later on at any time) and the system will automatically calculate and populate the anticipated End date, which will based on the Number Of Cycles multiplied by the Setup Duration plus Cycle Duration.

Once we hit Save and Close, we’ll see the Work Order has been populated with the production steps, input products and output products we defined in our BOM earlier.

When your Bill Of Materials includes Input Products that have batch or serial number tracking enabled, you will not be able to start the order (you will receive an alert) until batch/serial information has been entered, as shown in the following example:

Batch number warning

You can navigate to the Input Products tab and click on the Product record to reveal the option to input batch or serial numbers.

Selecting a batch tracked product in Input Products

Adding batch details to input products on a Work Order

If you haven’t already set up Resources for production, you can do so with these instructions.

You’ll also notice a resource tab which outlines any resources that we allocated to the production steps of the BoM. Just click on the desired line and you can assign resources.

For instance, brownies require an oven for baking so the resource group would be ‘Ovens’ and we’re able to allocate a specific oven for detailed production planning.

You can also see the total quantities of input and output products you’ll be dealing with. These are automatically calculated based on your BOM and the number of cycles.

Output products on a Work Order

You can also configure your manufacturing settings to enforce the requirement for all Output Products to be stock tracked.

Hitting Start will allocate the stock to the Work Order, essentially reserving it for production.

Note: if there in an error that prohibits production, you’ll receive a warning. This might be because there is insufficient underlying stock of raw materials, or maybe that you haven’t specified a batch number for the output product.

If all the set-up is correct you should now see that the Work Order is in progress. You will also see that the system has automatically populated the Start Date and End Date fields.

Once the production process is completed, hit Complete.

This will transform the underlying stock levels of your input and output products. The raw materials stock will reduce while the output product stock will increase.

You can also cancel the order, which will also cancel the reservation of the input products for production.

You can also start Work Orders in bulk from the main screen by selecting the desired records then pressing on the Start Work Order option.

Bulk starting Work Orders

To demonstrate we can head back to the individual input and output Product records and view the stock:

• If you started with stock that was imported from your accounting system, you will be able to see that the raw materials stock has depleted from your starting stock level.
• If you created starting stock to test the process, you’ll remember when we set up our products, we had 100 units of each of the raw materials and none of output products. We’ll now see that the raw materials stock has depleted

And the output Products now have stock available:

If you need to print or save a record of the work order, just hit Preview, then Work Order – and a PDF document will open for download.

You can also print multiple Work Orders at once from the main screen by selecting the orders and then clicking on Print Work Order – this will open a new tab with PDF document containing all the selected orders.

Printing Work Orders in bulk

You can also configure your manufacturing settings to automatically set orders to a Status of In Progress if they are printed.

If you have a number of orders to manufacture the same Output Product, you can merge these together in the event that:

1. The order is not adjustable.
2. The order is not marked as either Completed or Cancelled.
3. The order is not a custom job.

To merge orders, open an existing order and click Merge on the toolbar.

You will then need to confirm that you want to proceed.

A pop-up window will show you available orders that you can merge with – select one or more orders and click on Ok.

The selected orders will then be merged together.

In addition to viewing work orders on a list, you can also use Kanban view.

You can do this by clicking on Work Orders under the Manufacturing module.

Then choose Kanban view from the top left part of the page as seen below:

Using this option makes it easier to view the Status of Work Orders.

In the event that you need to need to cancel a Work order that has been started in the CRM, please click on Cancel on the toolbar as shown below:

This will release the committed products back in stock.