Plan a production order

A production order is one run of a bill of materials: it takes the materials out of stock, records the work and puts the finished goods in, at a cost it locks. Orders live in Production → Manufacturing, as a table, a board or a timeline. This article covers planning; Complete a production order covers the run itself.

Plan a run

Plan production and the timeline are available when Advanced production is set to Multi-level assembly in Settings → General. In Simple assembly, a shortfall on a confirmed sales order is assembled by itself, and Production → Manufacturing keeps the history of every run, with what it consumed and what it cost. See Build in layers.

Open Production → Manufacturing and click Plan production.
Choose the Product. Only products with an active bill of materials can be planned. If one has none, create it first. See Write a bill of materials.
Enter the Quantity to produce, the Production location and, if you like, Notes.
Click Create order.

The order is Planned. Orders also appear here when you confirm a sales order that stock cannot cover. See Make shortfalls produce themselves.

While an order is planned you can change its product, quantity and location. The fields save as you type.

Check the materials

Open the order. Required materials lists each material with Required, Available, Shortfall and Reserved, worked out from the bill of materials at the planned quantity. If something is short, you get three choices:

Keep the plan: partly reserved, the rest flagged. Say what you really used when you complete it.
Make what the stock allows: lowers the quantity to what the free materials can make, in whole pieces, and reserves them.
Plan the purchase: drafts purchases for the missing materials. See Create a purchase order.

Click Reserve materials to hold what is free. The order becomes Materials reserved. Cancelling an order releases everything it holds.

Statuses

Planned, Materials reserved, In progress, Quality check, Completed, On hold and Canceled. Completed is final, because stock has moved: a correction is a new order. A canceled order can be restored to Planned or In progress, but the release of its holds is not undone. The board does the same moves by drag and drop, but dragging to Completed is refused: open the order and run Execute.

If your workspace requires approval to start production, a start waits for a reviewer. Planning and scheduling are unaffected.

Cancel or archive

Cancel order asks for a Reason: Materials short, Equipment unavailable, Specification was wrong, Failed a quality check, Capacity moved to other work, No longer needed, Sales order canceled, Planned in error, Duplicate of another run or Other. Archive moves an order to the Archive, where it can be restored. Stock movements already posted are kept.

Select several orders to Shift dates, Duplicate or Archive them at once.

Print an order

Generate PDF, then Open document, gives the order sheet.