Shop Floor Settings
Five settings tabs describe your shop floor to the ERP: who works where, what things cost, how long they take, and the fixed lists of why work is rejected or stopped. They are what turn production records into capacity, cost and efficiency figures rather than just quantities.
Work Centers
Where work happens. Beyond the name, a work centre carries its capacity and its rates — the hours it can offer and what an hour there costs. Capacity is what the Work Centre Load report measures against; the rate is part of what a run costs.
A repeated work centre name is refused rather than failing on a database error, so the message you get says what is wrong.
Teams
Groups of employees who work together, each with a leader. A job card assigned to a team reaches its members, and the leader is the one notified. Teams are also a filter on the Board.
Labour Rates
What labour costs per hour, by team and by employee. These rates value the hours recorded against production and job cards, producing the labour component of a work order's cost and the Labour Cost and Efficiency report.
Use a fully-loaded rate, not a bare wage. A labour cost that excludes employer contributions and overhead understates what production costs, and every decision made from it is made on a number that is too low.
Cycle Times
How long an operation should take, per item and work centre. The cycle time is the standard that actual time is measured against — without one, efficiency has nothing to be efficient relative to.
Rejection Reasons
The fixed list of why output was rejected. Recorded against production, it produces the Rejection and Yield report. Keep it short: a long list is picked from carelessly and the ranking stops meaning anything.
Downtime Reasons
The fixed list of why a work centre stopped, used by the Downtime log and the Downtime and OEE report.
What each setting unlocks
| Set up | Makes possible |
|---|---|
| Work centre capacity | Work Centre Load. |
| Labour rates | Labour Cost and Efficiency, and the labour part of order cost. |
| Cycle times | Efficiency against a standard; Production Performance. |
| Rejection reasons | Rejection and Yield. |
| Downtime reasons | Downtime and OEE. |
| Teams | Job card assignment and board filtering. |
None of them is required to run production. Each one is required for the analysis it feeds, which is why a company that records quantities and nothing else finds the reports empty.
Related pages
- Work Centres
- Process Types
- Manufacturing Reports — what these settings feed
- Costing and closing