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Introduction to the Production Order Register

The Production Order is a tool you can use to help schedule work on Productions.

You will usually need to use Production Orders in two circumstances:

  1. You sell assembled or built Items in advance (in Sales Orders with future Planned Delivery Dates) and you need to schedule the assembly or building of those Items so that you can deliver them on time; and/or

  2. You use the MRP module to forecast sales of assembled or built Items, and you need to schedule the assembly or building of the forecast quantities of those Items.
Maintenance functions exist that you can use to create Production Orders from Sales Orders with Planned Delivery Dates and from Sales Forecasts. You can also create Production Orders yourself. When you mark a Production Order as Accepted, it will be placed in a queue for the relevant Machine. Each Machine has its own queue. You can then monitor the queue for each Machine, and change the position of individual Production Orders in that queue. The main tools that you can use to monitor queues are the Resource Planner and the Production Queue report.

When a Production Order reaches the front of the queue, you should create a Production from it, to begin the Production process. Creating a Production from a Production Order is necessary because the purpose of Production Orders is solely to organise and schedule Productions, including allocating the work to the appropriate Machines. Production Orders do not control the assembly process itself, and nor do they update stock levels of the Input and Output Items or the stock valuation in the Nominal Ledger.

You can create a Production from a Production Order using two methods:

  1. Open the Production Order and choose 'Finish Batch' from the Operations menu; and

  2. If you are using the Production Time Entry interface, a Production will be created automatically from a Production Order when you begin work on it. This interface will be useful if you have a Production Manager administering Production Orders, and where Production Operatives working on each Production only need to record the times they begin and end work and the quantities they produce. The Production Manager can instruct an Operative to work on a particular Production Order, and the corresponding Production will be created automatically when the Operative begins work.
The Production Order will remain in the queue until you mark it as Finished.

Please click here for details about the preparation steps you need to follow in order to use the Resource Planner to manage Production Orders, and for an example work flow with illustrations.

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