Engineering

Define what you make: items, bills of materials, processes, routings, and the change orders that control them.

Engineering is the product definition layer. Before anything can be sold, planned, or built, it has to be defined here. Everything else in Workcell points back to these records.

It covers five record types:

  • Items are the things you stock, buy, sell, or make: raw materials, components, and finished goods. An item carries its identifying number, description, unit of measure, and stocking rules.
  • BOMs (bills of materials) list the components and quantities that go into a made item. A BOM is the recipe.
  • Processes are the reusable operations your shop performs (cut, weld, machine, inspect), each with its setup and run characteristics.
  • Routings order those processes into the sequence of steps used to make an item, and tie each step to the resource that runs it.
  • Change orders control how all of the above evolve, capturing what changed, why, and the revision it produced.

How it fits together

An item is defined by a BOM (what it is made of) and a routing (how it is made), whose steps reference reusable processes:

Engineering item structure: an Item branches into a BOM listing components and a Routing of operations, where each operation references a reusable Process

An item's BOM and routing are what Production reads to build it and what Accounting reads to cost it. Keeping them accurate is the foundation everything downstream depends on.

Revisions and change control

Items, BOMs, and routings are versioned. Rather than editing a released definition in place, you raise a change order that produces a new revision, leaving the prior one intact as a record of what was built before. This keeps history auditable when a design changes mid-production.

The how-tos

  1. Create an item so it can be sold, bought, made, or stocked. See Create an item.
  2. Build a BOM to list what a made item is built from. See Build a BOM.
  3. Define a process as a reusable shop operation. See Define a process.
  4. Create a routing to sequence the steps that make an item. See Create a routing.
  5. Manage change orders to evolve controlled definitions under approval. See Manage change orders.

For how versioning works, see Revisions and change control. For what each state means, see BOM and routing statuses and Change order statuses.

Where to go next