Product Showcase Video: Using Materials for Remnant Tracking, Quoting, Purchasing, and Nesting in Fulcrum

Finding efficiency through nesting and remnant tracking requires your system to think of material inventory the same way you do — as raw material. While many systems force you to set dimensions on inventory, Fulcrum allows you to group pieces of inventory by their material type (sheet/plate, grade, and gauge).

Hear from Product Manager Emily Lupico about how Fulcrum promotes efficiencies in raw materials from quoting to nesting.

Transcript:

Intro:

Hi, I'm Emily, product manager at Fulcrum, and I'm going to show you our materials feature. The materials feature was built to help you unify materials that you use on a daily basis in your shop. It also helps improve efficiencies from quoting all the way through production.

We're going to start off here on the items grid, where we manage live inventory. If you're interested in learning about how we manage live inventory in Fulcrum, please check out the link below. But in this video, we're just going to focus on materials.

If we look at a common material, in this case, 1-inch plate, you can set the average price per pound of that material and then you can also create physical sizes that you either use on a regular basis or want to keep in inventory.

Raw Materials in Inventory

Now, let’s use material on the BOM. We're currently on the items page for this 5O star, which we're going to cut out of our 1-inch steel plate. If we go into the 1-inch steel plate on the BOM, we can see that we have stored nesting details. Fulcrum knows the density of the material, so based on the nesting details that you provide, we can calculate the unit cost. If you're going to use this for a quote, you can just pick which nesting details you want to use for the estimated material cost and send it out.

If you're ready to pick which specific item you're going to use to make this star, you can pick the inventory right here. This is all the inventory that you have available for this 1-inch steel plate.

Capturing Remnants

Now that you've seen how we use material on the BOM, I'm going to show you how we use that information to make it really quick and easy for operators to add their drop or remnant back into inventory. Here we are in job tracking, which is Fulcrum's interface for operators to use on the shop floor. They can go ahead and pick the two sheets of 1-inch plate that they need, and then when they go to complete the operation, Fulcrum can automatically anticipate how much material they have left over based on the nesting details that you set up on the BOM.

But if anything changes, they can make that adjustment, complete the operation, and then this remnant is automatically added back into your inventory.

Purchasing Materials

Let’s see how we use material to make better purchasing decisions. We're currently in Fulcrum's purchase planning grid, where Fulcrum aggregates all of your material demand across the shop and makes purchasing recommendations. Here we have our 1-inch steel plate. We can see how many pounds we have on hand, how many pounds we need, how many pounds we need to buy, and we can create a PO directly from here. Or we can go into the recommendation and see which jobs are producing this demand, so we know what size sheets to buy.

Once you know what size sheets to buy, you can start the PO for the material size that you need, and the PO is created.

Outro

Thanks for following along! As you can see, the materials feature can create lots of efficiencies across the shop, from quoting all the way through production. If you're interested in learning more about parts of Fulcrum that we covered today, please check out our other videos.

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This transcript was written with the help of AI.