Create and use Alternative Work Centers

Work Centers represents production units that have the capacity to manufacture raw materials into semi-finished products or finished products. They could be either a group of workers or machinery. This feature supports manufacturers in efficient planning and productivity forecasting.

In daily production, it’s normal to have various manufacturing activities taking place at the same time. Work centers could be used simultaneously which leads to difficulties in measuring production efficiency and might not be taking full advantage of available production capacity. Viindoo Software provides the Alternative Work Centers to facilitate the optimization of business resources in these struggles.

Configure Alternative Work Centers

You can activate the Work Centers feature by navigating to Manufacturing > Configuration > Settings, then enable Work Orders and click Save to save the configuration.

Warning

To active the Work Center feature, users need to have the access right to the system Settings.

Next, create new work centers, including the main work center and alternative ones by navigating to Manufacturing > Configuration > Work Centers, then click on Create.

On the work center form, you can configure alternative work centers on the Alternative Workcenters field, then press Save.

On the other hand, on the Bills of Materials, you need to set the work centers configured above for each operation.

Alternative Work Centers application in Manufacturing operations

When there is a planned but unfinished manufacturing order, on the next orders that use the same work centers, the alternative work centers will be used in order to avoid overlapping and optimize the resources usage.

Create the first manufacturing order, using the work center that have alternative work centers configured and plan for it.

Create the second manufacturing order using the same work center as the previous order.

When you press Plan, the configured alternative work center will be updated in the second manufacturing order.