Work Orders

We’ve now defined our BOMs (our recipes) for manufacturing. A work order essentially records the manufacturing process as being completed and transforms your stock accordingly.

When you run a work order:

• The stock of your input products will be allocated.

When you complete the work order:

• The stock of your input products will reduce, and
• The stock of your output products will increase accordingly.

To create a work order, head to the Main Menu, expand the Manufacturing Module and select Work Orders.

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

From here, you’ll be prompted to select the BOM that the work order is based on. Then you can enter a name for the Work Order (Bakehouse Fudge Brownies), a location for production (Western Sydney Kitchen), any production notes you might have and a batch number that will be assigned to the final products (if your output product is batch tracked).

On the right hand column you can choose the number of cycles you’d like to run (for this example, let’s say we’re baking 10 batches), a duration for the work order (to estimate the actual duration based on the number of cycles), the work order start date, and the expiry date assigned to the batch number.

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.

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.

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.

Once the work order has been 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.

To demonstrate we can head back to the individual product records and view the stock. 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.

The manufacturing process is ultimately determined by your preferences. Our system allows you to create a singular BOM to take raw materials and produce an output product that is ready for sale. For the sake of this brownie example, this might include all ingredients, bags, packaging components etc. Alternatively, you might want to set up one BOM that creates a bulk brownie (using all the ingredients) and another that slices and packages the brownies into individual servings. It’s fully customisable to suit your process.