Some things are worth more than the sum of their parts! Not least in manufacturing, where the material costs of components are just the start of the true cost price of your shiny new finished goods. Extensive work, assembly, processing and labour goes into making something special – and this is where many businesses add their most value to the bottom line.

Process Routing is a special SQLWorks tool to help Production Managers organise, track and cost this essential part of the business workflow – ensuring finished goods are not only ‘made’ efficiently, but also priced appropriately.

If you have the Manufacturing module enabled, default Process Routes in SQLWorks can be assigned to the Bills of Material of any stock item, and these become the default process route for all new Works Orders instructing your team to make that item.

How Process Routing Works

Each Route is comprised of a series of process steps, each of which is given up to three attributes:

• Process Type – a ‘type’ of work, from a list defined by your business (mandatory.)
• Work Centre – a location where work happens, such as a piece of machinery or factory zone.
• Employee – a specific person, authorised to carry out that step in the process route.

To build a process route, simply drag and drop processes, work centres and employees onto a BOM’s process route, building up the chain of default steps needed to make the finished item. The route is automatically added to each new Works Order for that BOM.

(However, if an individual Works Order needs a different route on a specific Works Order, you can either ‘Change’ to a different pre-saved route with different steps, or ‘Edit’ the steps given to that specific Works Order using the default as your starting point, but adding your variations. Future Works Orders for this item will still use the BOM’s default process route, unless it is also updated.)

Each and every step on a Process Route can optionally contain detailed costings – based on labour and setup fees/time expired. In addition to setting your ‘Expected’ costs, you can use progress tracking to generate an ‘Actual’ cost for every step, and compare the two for an accurate picture of profitability.

Your factory may be full of active Works Orders, all taking different Process Routes on their journey to completion.

Key Benefits

There are several key benefits here:

Optional Extras

Depending on how you use Production Routing we’ve included extra controls to better fit the different kinds of business operations – and help you make better decisions. You can choose how to use all of these to get the most value from our software – or speak with our software development team, to introduce something entirely new.

Thanks for reading! For Production Routing and manufacturing software expertise, please contact our team today.

Good news! You’re in charge of a manufacturing business. Design an amazing finished product, buy its component parts, and set your team to work. Make something incredible and the World will surely beat a path to your door. Like so many industrialists before you, you are destined for greatness. As your finished goods are assembled you can watch your genius turn into innovation, skill into added value, and fame into fortune.

Well… maybe. But as your business scales, it becomes harder and harder to keep track of all the materials you need (and when you need them) to keep manufacturing on schedule. Disruptions begin to bite and there’s costly overheads everywhere you look, even underfoot.

Enter the MRP Run – a powerful process that some of the World’s most efficient manufacturing companies use to control purchasing and production. Using intelligent MRP software, even small businesses can organise sophisticated manufacturing operations without mistakes.

How MRP Works

Each time you begin an MRP run, SQLWorks scans through all your Sales (and Works) Orders, looking for demand for stock. It calculates which stock is already available, checks if components and materials are needed, and brings back recommendations. Those recommendations may be draft Purchase Orders (‘we need to buy A from Supplier B’) or Works Orders (We need to make X with Y.’)

For you, the human in the driving seat, things have changed. Your job is no longer the drudgery of compiling dozens of order lines, but to review MRP’s findings carefully, sense-check them, and be the authority that approves the next steps.

But think big! Unlike a human, MRP can scan through hundreds of orders, through multiple levels of Bill of Materials, cross-checking against tens of thousands of stock lines, bring back exact results in moments, and even prepare the paperwork for you to approve outgoing emails.

That automation potentially saves hundreds, even thousands, of person-hours creating routine purchase orders and works orders manually – and revolutionise the logistics behind manufacturing.

Key Benefits

There are several key benefits here:

Optional Extras

Depending on how you use MRP we’ve included extra controls to better fit the different kinds of business operations – and help you make better decisions. You can choose how to use all of these to get the most value from our software – or speak with our SQLWorks team, to introduce something entirely new.

Thanks for reading! For MRP and manufacturing software expertise, please contact our team today.

Backflushing is an alternative method of allocating components or materials to manufacturing, whereby stock is deducted only after production has been completed.

Backflushing makes it easier to work with quantities that would otherwise be highly impractical to ‘pick’ for use on Works Orders, and is a particularly useful technique when:

• • Components are too small or numerous to be ‘counted out’ in a sensible timeframe. (e.g.: screws, nuts, bolts, other low-cost parts used in volume.)
• • When materials are divisible, liquid, molten, gaseous, in lengths, weights, or otherwise issued ‘approximately.’ (e.g.: paint, ingredients, chemicals etc.)
• • Where a ‘spare’ quantity needs to be returned to stock after manufacturing is finished. (e.g.: scrapings, leftovers, recycled material.)

In SQLWorks every component on a Bill of Material (BOM) has a default allocation method – either ‘Standard’, ‘Backflush’ or ‘Return’ which defines how stock of this item will be ‘used up’ in the Stock Ledger. These work as follows:

• • ‘Standard’ – This is the default, and is used for all items that need to be counted out in advance of production. Components will be removed from stock when the user clicks ‘Take’ on the Works Order, before production begins.
• • ‘Backflush’ – Components will only be removed from stock after the Works Order is built, and the user is then asked to specify how much has been used.
• • ‘Return’ – Similar to backflushing, however components will only be removed from stock after the Works Order is built, and the user is then asked to specify a ‘spare’ quantity that gets returned to stock.

By changing a component stock item to ‘Backflush’ on a BOM, nothing will be removed from stock at the ‘Take’ stage, instead being deducted only after that BOM has been ‘built’ on a Works Order. The user can then specify how much has (or hasn’t) been used.

This is significantly more practical for certain items – although production managers may need to initially estimate the stock quantity of a Backflush item that they expect to use on its BOM (e.g.: how much paint an item typically needs.)

The user can edit a component’s default type by right clicking on it in a BOM, and choosing ‘Change Component Type.’ Components set to Backflush will be marked with a small ‘B’ symbol in the BOM.

When ‘Taken’ within a Works Order, only Standard items will listed as being removed from stock, and Backflush items will always show a taken quantity of zero (with the user then prompted after the ‘build’ stage for the correct quantity used for Backflush, or quantity excess for Return.)

For many manufacturers, drawing down stock ‘post-production’ in this way may be the only way to accurately update your usage of resources. Using backflushing is an efficient way of tracking manufacturing using more fluid components, and allows SQLWorks to keep your production precise.

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Made Smarter Update:

Lineal’s SQLWorks Software is officially registered as a specialist UK digital technologies provider for manufacturing.

Made Smarter is a UK-Government backed initiative launched in 2017, following a nationwide review of the manufacturing sector – and includes a number of private and public sector organisations helping to modernise industry and drive adoption of productivity-boosting technology in the sector.

Recognised fields include a wide range of next-generation technologies for manufacturing such as robotics & process control, data and systems integration, mobile and wearable devices, sensor innovations, machine learning, additive manufacturing and augmented reality technology.

“We’re delighted to see SQLWorks listed among some of this country’s most advanced and cutting-edge technology solutions for manufacturing” said Lineal’s Managing Director Mike Matthews. “The Made Smarter review highlights adoption of modern technology as a keystone for industry in this country, and we want SQLWorks to underpin real advancement and strength in the industry.”

Businesses can read the original findings of the Made Smarter Review here, and learn more about Made Smarter UK here.

For Business Software expertise and support, please contact our team today.

Production Planning

We’ve extended SQLWorks to include more powerful production planning/process routing in Version 10 – allowing Production Managers to masterplan working spaces, types of work, and employee skills to organise manufacturing capacity more effectively.

Workshop Map can be opened via the Products module in the NavBar, and uses three key elements:

Each Process Route has a series of numbered steps (carried out in a specific order) called a Work Flow. To organise the Work Flow, the production manager simply chooses the Work Centre, Process, and Employee that is assigned at each step – by dragging and dropping them into the Workflow builder.

Workflow steps each carry associated costs and manufacturing times, allowing the system to build a comprehensive picture of the process route a finished product must follow to be completed in full.

Production managers can save Template Process Routes and assign these to Bills of Material – with the right default process routes being loaded automatically on new Works Orders to save time. Expected completion times are estimated automatically, and progress can be logged as each step of the Workflow is underway

Any Process Routes that are currently in use will be shown in the ‘Active Process Routes’ table, along with the details of the BOMs being produced which follow that process route.

Production Managers can also use this part of SQLWorks to generate reports (either from the perspective of Work Centres, Processes or Employee) to see outstanding and current Works Orders, and to gauge capacity from each.

This helps inform staffing decisions, shift patterns or identify production bottlenecks. Where there is a clash (for example, if a ‘Welding’ process employee has more welding hours due on Works Orders than is available in the calendar), SQLWorks will display ‘CLASH’ in red next to that Bill of Materials.

Overall SQLWorks’ Production Planning gives Production Managers the power to coordinate working spaces/resources, types of work, and personnel for maximum control. Production Routes help structure and streamline the manufacturing process, and organise manufacturing capacity more intelligently.

For expertise and software assistance, please contact our SQLWorks Team today

SQLWorks Document management has reached the next level, enabling tagging of engineering documents and automated printing alongside Works Orders.

As shown in our Introduction to Document Management, many types of files can be added and stored within SQLWorks, linked to other data, downloaded or referenced whenever required. Our development team have also enabled tagging of specific files as ‘engineering’ documents so they can be automatically transferred through to production.

Saving a .jpeg or .pdf to a stock item’s document tab is a simple drag-and-drop process, supported by tagging with the engineering tag. When a Works order is created for that Bill of Materials, those supporting documents can be pulled through for printing automatically.

This is especially useful for assembly instructions, photographs, blueprints and similar that help guide during the production process.

Setting specific criteria in ‘Accounts preferences’ and ‘Document Analysis’ which can be found on the Navbar, allows a specific ‘tag’ such as one named Engineering, to be selected when saving a document on a stock item. Tagged documents appear in the ‘Documents List’ in the top right of the Works Order automatically, and when printing or previewing your Works Order SQLWorks finds the associated document and asks you to confirm whether you would like to print the engineering documents.

This feature is especially useful if you have drawings, assembly instructions or diagrams for example, that need to accompany the Works order when sent to the shopfloor/workshop for the build process.

If you would like to find out more about how SQLWorks can make the Manufacturing processes more efficient and less time consuming, please get in touch with our SQLWorks team via email [email protected] or call 01271 441570.

Announcing Version 10:

Lineal Software Solutions are excited to announced the public release of our next generation of SQLWorks software.

Version 10 of our flagship business management suite harnesses more advanced manufacturing capabilities for the first time – introducing brand new material requirements planning (MRP) capabilities into our existing integrated accounting, CRM & stock control platform.

Automation is critical to productivity. SQLWorks MRP allows businesses to instantly gauge future demand for stock items & materials based on a flexible time horizon and existing stock availability, automatically generate purchase orders for approved suppliers, automatically roll-up part and cost changes through bills of material, and automatically create works orders for production centres on the factory floor.

These hotly-anticipated new features will help drive real business benefits, especially among manufacturing and logistics companies: including more intelligent and cost-effective purchasing, optimised stock holding, and coordinated forward planning of production.

Factory managers can now backflush manufactured items, auto-attach engineering documents, optionally roll-up updated part-costings from purchasing through the relevant kits, and even import new assemblies from popular engineering CAD software via drag-and-drop.

 “… British manufacturing needs a factory reset.”

Mike Matthews, Lineal Software Solutions

MRP is an immensely powerful tool for running a business – and we’ve given users the ability to drill-right down into purchasing and production recommendations – finding the exact source of demand from potentially thousands of orders, to line level, with a simple double-click.

SQLWorks manufacturing abilities integrate seamlessly with other business processes across accounting, CRM and stock control – and we’re planning further extensions to functionality for release later in 2020: including detailed capacity planning, support for ‘Just-In-Time’ (JIT) style manufacturing, and more complex ad-hoc report building.

We’ve also made some updates to the visual identity of SQLWorks with this iteration to help make our software feel smoother and more accessible to new users, and expanded Lineal’s UK Software Development Team of Omnis developers to hasten our development cycle.

Mike Matthews, Lineal’s Managing Director, explained: “This is a terrific new leap forward for our SQLWorks software. The new release is our most advanced ever, and introduces powerful new manufacturing and logistical control to our existing business management tools.”

“We believe the ability for industry to automatically complete important engineering tasks – like importing newly-designed assemblies, production planning, updating part costs and forecasting future operations – will prove a popular choice among manufacturers.”

“Post-lockdown many firms will be doing some serious soul-searching about whether their systems are really up to scratch. British manufacturing needs a factory reset. If you can’t innovate then you’re at a dead end, and modernisation will be an important part of the UK’s economic recovery.”

SQLWorks Version 10 with MRP is available NOW