The Power of Process Routing

 

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.

 

process routing

 

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.

 

how process routing works

 

Key Benefits

There are several key benefits here:

  • Organised Production

    Use a single pane of glass to define (or re-define) your shopfloor’s master-plan centrally. Redirect works orders and the instructions that appear on them when you need to respond to events, control how and where work should be done, assigning it to the right people for maximum efficiency.

  • Identify Bottlenecks

    With a structured view of types of work, the places where they happen, and the personnel assigned to do them, production reporting allows production managers to instantly shuffle the outstanding schedule of works orders to get an accurate sense of workloads – from any perspective.

  • True Profitability

    The real holy-grail of manufacturing: compare your expected vs actual production costs, factoring in setup and runtime, labour and overheads, for every item of finished goods – to establish exactly how profitable it was to make, and what the true sale price should be.

 

 

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.

Setup vs Runtime

The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step – but is this production run worth the effort? Factor in both the setup and runtime cost of each production step for an accurate costing of each stage of the process route, whether you’re making a single widget, or a thousand.

Labour vs Overhead

Personpower and overheads are not the same thing, so why cost them as such? Split your production costs for each step into overhead and labour, and know exactly where your profitability (or unprofitability) for any part of the production route derives from.

Completion %

You’ll finish it on Monday, right? Update any step on the process route with a completion percentage if you need more granular production tracking. Don’t worry about the maths – based on your predicted production costs, SQLWorks will automatically calculate how much cost has been incurred so far.

Role Restriction

Lock certain types of work to the employee with the training, skills and proficiency to do it, by setting defaults on your process routes for those steps. Need to make sure one of the old hands does the tricky bit? Make it part of the standard operating procedure.

Actual vs Expected

The Holy Grail of manufacturing – compare your predicted against actual costs incurred for any step on the process route, generating a forensically-accurate production cost for every stage, of every item of your finished goods. Get a detailed picture of profitability… and know exactly what to quote next time.

Production Reporting

Balance the load across your entire factory and identify bottlenecks at any machine, process type or employee. Production Reporting allows you to see exactly where the biggest burden of outstanding Works Orders will route via, and allow you to plan accordingly.

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

‘Negative’ Stock & Advance Batches

One of the questions we’re often asked surrounds the tricky issue of ‘negative’ stock quantities, and how SQLWorks can help warehousing operations balance flexibility with security.

By default, SQLWorks does not allow what some companies choose to call a ‘negative’ stock quantity. Ordinarily, the only stock that can be invoiced is the actual quantity of stock you hold, the act of invoicing moves it out of stock, and you cannot invoice a customer for stock you don’t have.

This is our recommended model, because it helps ensure business keep an accurate stock valuation and acts as natural protection against errors. While promises can be made to customers about stock owed, these remain only promises, and do not influence the company financials.

This model also makes intuitive sense to end-users: the ‘actual’ quantity will never be less than zero – reflecting the ‘actual’ amount a member of staff will find in a warehouse if they perform a stock check in person (either ‘some’ or ‘none’, but never a negative.)

However there are some instances where this principle runs into real-world difficulties. For example:

 

In fast-paced business operations or large factory sites, manufactured goods may need to be physically loaded for dispatch before a shopfloor member of staff or office team at another location are able to confirm in the system that the new stock quantity is completed. The negative stock restriction can then become a bottleneck, as a lack of stock quantity seen in the system holds up the dispatch & invoicing process, and delays the delivery of stock that was otherwise ready on time.

Production runs may not be exact – in some industries (such as printing) including and invoicing a small excess quantity or overrun of finished goods is typical: once again this can create a delay: where dispatch is held up by a tiny excess quantity that isn’t recognised in stock without some minor adjustments to data, and so can’t be invoiced in full.

Large production runs may have special contract terms or non ad-hoc invoicing arrangements agreed, where invoicing might sometimes run ahead of the production of stock. For this, a company would need to be able to invoice stock they ‘owe’ to a customer, and takes an acceptable level of risk for doing so.

 

SQLWorks offers three different solutions to this kind of ‘negative stock’ problem:

 

Solution #1 – Enabling the Dispatch Note System

Enabling the Dispatch Note system adds one extra step in the progression from Order to Invoice: the Dispatch Note. Before an invoice, the user must issue a dispatch note to a customer, which can contain stock lines selected from multiple orders, even those without stock quantity available to be invoiced yet.

The quantity ‘dispatched but not invoiced’ is logged separately under ‘Pending’ until enough ‘Actual’ stock quantity is identified. Once the user is ready to invoice, the company must invoice from the available lines listed on existing dispatch notes.

This system doesn’t allow stock to go ‘negative’, since the user must always ‘book in’ the actual quantity to eventually cover what was dispatched, before they can finally invoice the customer – but it does allow the customer to receive their goods promptly, while maintaining traceability over what was shipped. The Dispatch Note system is a good solution where the underlying issue is the time delay.

The authority to issue dispatch notes can also be optionally granted to warehousing staff, and this system also works in tandem with the Dispatch Planner.

 

Solution #2 – ‘Flexibility Mode’

The first of two ‘Advance Batch’ modes, this option permits SQLWorks to create synthetic batches of stock it doesn’t have physically available. Doing so allows a company to invoice for stock they don’t have yet – albeit with some important safeguards in place.

Firstly, these artificial advance batches are tagged as such behind the scenes to prevent any errors being introduced into the stock valuation. Secondly, when new stock quantity then arrives in from completed manufacturing or purchase order deliveries, this artificial stock quantity figure is absorbed first – reflecting the fact that the real stock was already invoiced out.

Thirdly, in this mode SQLWorks is only allowed to create as much artificial stock quantity as is already listed on outstanding Purchase Orders or Works Orders. While the user is now allowed to send an invoice for stock that isn’t quite ‘to hand’ yet, there has to be a corresponding entry on the system indicating from where the business was expecting that stock to materialise.

advance batches shown in SQLWorks stock control

For example: Advance and Adjusted stock quantities shown above, and a marker showing that stock batch 1016576 is an advance batch of x10 quantity that has been created by the system.

If you have Advance Batches turned on, you can use a quick filter under the Search bar to see all the items that have active advance batches (i.e those with negative stock that will use up future incoming quantity). If you print a stock valuation, advance batches will be treated as a ‘negative’ quantity for valuation purposes.

 

Solution #3 – ‘Unrestricted Mode’

The second of two ‘Advance Batch’ modes, this option permits SQLWorks to create batches of stock it doesn’t have physically available, with fewer restrictions.

Firstly, these artificial batches are tagged as such behind the scenes to prevent any errors being introduced into the stock valuation. Secondly, when new stock quantity then arrives in from completed manufacturing or purchase order deliveries, this artificial stock quantity figure is absorbed first – reflecting the fact that the real stock was already invoiced out.

However, in this mode there is no upper-limit enforced by the quantity outstanding on existing Works Order or Purchase Orders – allowing the company complete freedom to invoice irrespective of actual stock quantity, or even potential stock quantity.

Adopting this setting has important stock valuation and tax implications, so should only be used with great caution.

 

For ERP and stock control expertise, please contact our team today.

How MRP Revolutionises Purchasing

 

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.

 

how mrp works

 

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:

  • Optimised Buying

    The bigger your business, the harder it becomes for one person to ‘see’ the whole picture themselves. Integrated MRP software has a much clearer visibility of both the stock you hold and the demand that’s coming, and can make clear decisions about quantities needed than even the World’s most perceptive purchasing manager.

  • Better Timing

    As long as your Sales and Production teams are logging demand for stock via Sales Orders and Works Orders, MRP can ‘look ahead’ into the future; warning you of stock shortages before they happen and making sure they are avoided. Delays cost money, so become a scheduling champion.

  • A Stress-Free Life

    Well not entirely, but it’s true that MRP can save many hours of staff time doing routine admin. Like other automation, MRP is particularly good at the ‘mundane’ work: volume purchasing that involves lots of lines and SKU codes. While these are not difficult for a human, it’s often not the best use of their time.

 

 

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.

Closer Investigation

SQLWorks MRP answers the eternal question of every Purchasing Manager – ‘why do I need this?’ With our investigation button, the system can serve up an exact answer for where the source of demand for a stock item is coming from, what’s been found in stock, and allow the user to easily drill down to review the underlying Sales Order or Works Order.

Flexible time horizons

Businesses can choose to shorten or extend the timescale for how far ahead SQLWorks ‘looks’ when doing your MRP run. Extending the timescale can give your earlier warning of future peaks in demand, helping you prepare earlier – while shortening the timescale helps bolster your cash flow by ensuring you’re only buying what you need imminently.

Demand Filtering

By default each MRP run looks at all demand for stock – across both new sales orders and outstanding works orders – but you can optionally switch this to ‘Customer Orders Only’ – prioritising customer needs in your calculations over any new in-house demand for reserves.

Warehouse Filtering

Your MRP run can be isolated to a single SQLWorks Warehouse for greater accuracy. This is especially important for companies with multiple warehouses either in the UK or overseas, because it helps avoid costly recommendations to move stock between warehouses where the distances are impractical.

MRP reporting

Your MRP run can also be run as a report – and there’s no obligation to create the Purchase or Works Orders MRP recommends. Even if you’re not quite ready to implement MRP yet, you can still use it as a guide to inform your own purchasing decisions, or to test the feature.

Non-Manufacturing

Wholesale, resale and other kinds of companies can still get value from MRP even they’re not doing any manufacturing – because buying and selling remains essential even if stock doesn’t go through any processing.

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

Introduction to Backflushing

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.)

backflushing

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.

SQLWorks Live on Microsoft Windows 11

SQLWorks Version 10 is officially live on both Microsoft Windows 11, with early tests suggesting a significant performance improvement.

Microsoft Windows 11 is the first major Windows release for six years, and introduces a raft of visual, technical and security updates to the world’s most widespread desktop operating system.

Our SQLWorks Software Development Team – which uses both Apple macOS and Microsoft Windows for development – works hard to ensure our software maintains the best possible lifespan and interoperability, without the need for companies to spend on paid version upgrades. This includes advance testing on preview build/upcoming operating systems via virtual machine, to ensure our customers won’t experience compatibility issues.

You can learn more about upgrading to Windows 11 here, including the require minimum specifications. Uptake across industry PCs is expected to be somewhat slower than for Windows 10, as many pre-2018 processors prior to the Spectre and Meltdown incidents won’t support the update – meaning that the adoption of Windows 11 will be driven predominantly by new devices.

SQLWorks is still fully operable on any 64-bit version of Windows 10, which itself remains fully supported by Microsoft until October 2025.

Video: Manufacturing Brilliance

 

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Using Engineering Documents

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.

engineering documents

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.

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.

SQLWorks Manufacturing Launches

 

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.

 

MRP software

“… We are clear that the faster adoption of technology will result in greater investment and in more manufacturing taking place in the UK.”

 

UK Gov ‘Made Smarter’ Manufacturing Review

 

 

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.

 

sqlworks versions

 

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.”

 

manufacturing

Measurable Business Benefits


  • One, fully-integrated platform
  • Heightened financial visibility
  • Hours of work duplication saved by automation
  • Greater manufacturing control
  • Optimised spending & stock holding
  • Genuine support for business continuity

 

 

“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


 

sqlworks contact

Discover More


Simple, fast and intuitive data entry. Detailed, responsive and targeted data analysis.

 

 

 

Learn more at www.sqlworks.co.uk or by contacting our UK Software Development Team today.

Fact Sheet: Works Orders

To compliment SQLWorks manufacturing and kitting, Stock Ledger allows users to create and manage manufacturing works orders to different degrees of detail.

(For an introduction to SQLWorks manufacturing and kitting, click here.)

Works Orders are accessible from the Stock Ledger screen, under the ‘Products’ module, in the main NavBar (1), by clicking the ‘Works Orders’ tab for a chosen stock item.

The two tables on the left-hand side show ‘Active Word Orders’ still being worked upon, and ‘Completed Works Orders’ which have been finished (2.)

To the right the ‘Build Quantity’ (3) Panel shows the parts needed for that stock item, how many are available in the default warehouse to use for this works order, and the maximum finished items that can be built from these parts.

The lower right panels (4) show a summary of the scheduled builds on a selected works order, and the parts required for each of these scheduled builds (in case the Works Orders vary between builds.)

 

Quick Build

Users can complete a simple works order by right clicking in the ‘Active Works Orders’ and choosing ‘Quick Build.’ This simplified option checks the correct parts out of stock from their default warehouses, completes a Works Order immediately, and checks in the finished item into stock in its default warehouse.

This is useful for simple builds where no extra works order detail is required and the works order doesn’t need to be drafted in advance.

 

Full Works Order

Users can create a full new works order by right clicking in the ‘Active Works Orders’ and selecting ‘New Works Order’.

This opens a new works order window for the chosen stock item– these can be given header information including a Total Build Quantity. Parts for kitting will be taken from the ‘Take Stock From’ Warehouse code, and (via the designated build bin) the finished item will be checked into the ‘Build Product Where?’ Warehouse code and Bin number.

Each line on the Works Order represents one ‘schedule’ for building a given quantity of the kit – with the quantity of that schedule enterable on the left hand side. A component list is also shown here, to help inform production numbers.

The middle column (‘Cost Groups’) displays advanced Construction Time / Cost Centre additions for this kit if this feature is turned on in SQLWorks.*

The ‘Build Group Column’ is used for the actual building of the works order: typing a quantity into the ‘Take’ field and clicking ‘Take’ removes the required parts from the ‘Take Stock From’ warehouse, and doing the same in the ‘Build’ field and clicking ‘Build’ assembles the new kitted item and moves it to your designated ‘Build Product Where?’ Warehouse and Bin.

You can also cancel quantity’s from the Works Order by typing a quantity into the ‘Cancel Qty’ field.

On the right hand side of each line the ‘Inspection Group’ allows you to enter up to four custom quality testing/inspection checkpoints for each works order schedule, date-stamped for approval.

Works Orders can be saved without being built (to schedule future work), but when the ‘built’ quantity within the works order and any cancelled quantity added together equal the ‘Total Quantity’ required, the works order will automatically be moved to the ‘Completed Works Order’ list.

 

*Construction Time / Cost Centres

Advanced users can turn on ‘Default Construction Costs (per Hour)’ and ‘Default Construction Times (per Hour)’ which will appear at the top of the Works Order Tab if used.

This allows the user to save details for time taken, and costs expended, as the finished kit is processed through up to a maximum of six stages to complete the Works Order, and can be factored into sales costs accordingly.

 

Manufacture and Kitting

manufacture

SQLWorks includes a manufacture and kitting tool able to budget for and build manufactured products using a selection of saved kits.

Manufacturing is accessible to users of the SQLWorks Advanced Stock, and can be found within the Stock Ledger screen under the ‘Products’ module in the main Navbar (1).

Clicking the ‘Kit Details’ Tab opens the kitting information for the selected stock item (2), and users should click the ‘Setup’ button if using these tools for a given stock item for the first time. By default, SQLWorks saves up to 3 alternate builds for each manufactured item (although more are available) with saved descriptions for each build (3).

Each stock item in your SQLWorks stock ledger can be both a ‘parent’ (made from its stock item ‘children’ – its components) or a ‘child’ of another stock item ‘parent’. Right-clicking opens options to ‘add child’ (component part) including values for both the components and associated labour costs.

Saved builds can include many components, sub components, and more levels as needed.

On the right hand side of the panel (4) are fields displaying the ‘Base Component Cost’ (the total value of the component parts as worked out by your saved SQLWorks stock valuation model) the ‘Marked Up Component Cost’ (the total markup value once percentage markups such as labour or assembly costs have been applied to each component for this build) and the ‘Current Kit Cost’ with your assigned sale cost for the finished product.

The kit price will be re-calculated automatically as component parts change, or if you have disabled this feature, by pressing the ‘Re-calculate’ button. Users can update the cost details for a build, allowing for any recent changes to stock ledger components, their value or assembly markup costs. You can also use saved shortcuts in the quick select menu of the Stock Ledger to view ‘Parent Items’ and ‘Child Items’ for easy searching.

SQLWorks manufacturing gives you a toolkit to organize the manufacture of kits from countless components, and to keep track of costs at every stage of the production line.

 

For specialist manufacture and kitting tools – speak to us about SQLWorks Stock Control today.