Product Updates

Fulcrum has been beta testing a pricing option using Shop Rate that is being fully released today.  You’ll see a new “Shop Rate” option in pricing areas of Fulcrum, such as quote line items, sales order line items, and items’ sales tab.  When that option is selected, the price will be calculated as:

( Material Cost * ( 1 + Material Markup ) ) + ( Estimated Times + Operation Shop Rates )

To ensure your operations have the necessary info for the calculations, be sure to fill in values in Business Setup > System Data > Operations > Hourly Shop Rates:

Having good data is so important, especially when it comes to costs and inventory.  While Fulcrum does display warnings for unpicked material, operators are busy humans and sometimes press through the warning without picking.  This can create situations with understated costs or showing inventory as available that was actually used on a job.

To help reduce missed picks, Fulcrum has added a new setting in Business Setup > System Data > Job Settings called “Auto-pick material on job completion”.

When this setting is on, it will auto-pick planned materials when a job is completed from the job tracker or the job's page.  A few points // FAQs:

• If there isn't enough material in inventory, it won't complete the pick
• If there is already a pick against the material, it will skip it under the assumption that it was intentionally under-picked.

Important Note: If your operators can get in the habit of picking, that will always be the best case scenario.  Explicit picking is more accurate and explicit than any automation.  For that reason and as noted above, there are guardrails on this feature and we stuck to safe assumptions.  That being said, if picking is being missed enough in your shop to cause a data problem beyond the occasional touch up, then check this out!

A slightly shorter week due to the holiday, but the team was still hard at work making several performance improvements.  Again, these efforts will compound over time and this is a continued priority for the team.  Here’s what they were able to accomplish this week:

• Public API Performance Improvements - even if you’re not directly using the public API, Fulcrum’s integrations get and update data through the API.  So updates here impacts anyone with the integration.  And if you are using the API, then you’ll see even more benefits.  These changes reduce the load across the system by more efficiently transacting the data.
• Job Creation and Editing - routings can contain a lot of data, by making improvements here job creation and editing will also be improved.
• Inventory Planning - recalculating material availability, purchasing demand, and production demand happens all the time behind the scenes.  Optimizing this makes more room for the rest of the app to be faster.
• Loading Operations for Job Tracking
• Finding Jobs Associated with a Sales Order

More to come!

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To help schedulers and production managers understand their schedule capacity, there’s an existing report in Scheduling > Backlog.  However, whenever we saw teams using this report we noticed a couple of things - they wanted to see further out, and they wanted to know what was included in that time.  Now you can do both!  Select up to 8 weeks out from the ‘Weeks to Show’ dropdown, and click ‘View Operations’ on a piece of equipment to see what’s scheduled.  As a bonus, click on the bars to see just the operations scheduled or overlapping that day.  Here’s a video overview of the updates.

The reporting tool in Reporting > Report Builder already had datasets for total job costs with estimates vs actuals.  However, to provide deeper visibility, we added a dataset that includes a breakdown of estimates and actuals for setup, labor, machine, material, and outside processing by each item and operation on a job.  You can aggregate, slice, and dice this in Report Builder to create a variety of reports.

You know that feeling when you look in the mirror after a fresh haircut?  Well, our designers just gave a fresh cut to the Month-End Reporting page in Account > Reporting.

You can now use {{po_pdf_custom_title}} in your Purchase Order email template. This builds on last week’s release and brings further flexibility to Purchase Order email customization.  To set this up, head to Business Setup > System Data > PDFs & Emails and use the {{po_pdf_custom_title}} variable.

This is a continued focus and priority for the team, and these updates will be able to stack on top of each other.  This week we had many specific performance updates. Examples include price breaks, file attachments, API endpoints, job tracking, chat, and more.  More to come!

We want to make sure you can report on anything that helps you keep a pulse on the business.  As this project gets close to the finish line, the following datasets were added:

• Time Clock
• Scrap
• NCR and CAPA Impacts

You can check these out in Reporting > Report Builder. Remaining datasets coming soon: detailed job cost breakdowns and detailed operator activity.

We’ve frequently heard comments like “Every time I send an invoice to this customer, I need to cc {this person}”.  Now you can!  Customer contacts now have “Include on Emails for” options for Quotes, Sales Orders, Packlists, and Invoices.  Selecting one will mean they’ll be included on every email of that type, for that customer.  You can set that up in the edit contact menu in Sales > Customers > select a customer > select a contact.

Fulcrum allows you to change the header on your PO PDF based on the status (ex: RFQ or PO).  Previously, downloaded PDFs always used ‘PO’ (e.g., ‘PO1234’). Now, the same rule-based logic applies to the file name.  This helps avoid confusion as to whether the document is a PO or RFQ.

If you already use a custom PDF header, no additional change is needed!  The header logic will automatically apply to the file name so that they’ll be the same.

Note: if you don’t have this set up, and would like to, head to your Business Setup > PDFs & Emails > Purchase Orders and use this as your ‘Custom Title.'

We’ve updated status colors across Scheduling, Jobs, Work Orders, and Job Tracking to make them consistent for both Production Managers and Operators. What changed:

• Job Tracking was using different colors for Pending and Paused — those now match the rest of the app for consistency.
• Scheduled and Approved used to share the same light blue, making it harder to scan some grids. Now:
  
  • Scheduled is dark blue
  • Approved stays light blue

Details:

• Jobs / Work Orders:
  
  • Scheduled = dark blue
  • Needs Review = slightly new purple tint (easier to scan)
• Job Tracking:
  
  • Paused = changed from yellow to grey
  • Pending = changed from grey to purple
  • Chat = changed from purple to blue, matching selected user profiles

This is a continued focus and priority for the team.  This release includes optimizations to:

• Faster Loading for Timers - anywhere timers are used will experience improved performance, such as job tracking, real time personnel/operations, and time management.
• ‘Can Make’ Calculations - for quoting, Fulcrum will calculate how much of an item you can make based on existing quantity (so you know whether you will need to order material or have enough on hand).  However, because the calculation considers demand from other jobs, it can become complex.  This has been improved to run faster.
• Sales Orders and Quotes - the scrolling blue line across the top was from loading a lot of calculated data.  This release improves how loading this data is handled to avoid so much blue bar loading.
  Settings - lots of pages reference settings, so adding some optimizations here yields small performance gains across several pages.

More to come!

We’ve been gathering lots of customer feedback and taking action on it – recent updates have enabled direct correlation between a shipment and an invoice. Expanding on this, the tracking number from the associated shipment will now be visible on the invoice PDF.

The collective efforts of the team are driving progress on performance.  This week, the team focused on the sales order and customer pages.  Specifically:

• ‘Status’ tab on a Sales Order - this page collects a lot of information from across the app, with several opportunities to speed up gathering that data. The impact will be most noticeable for customers with dozens of line items on an order.
• Sales Order Grid - similarly, the KPI graphs at the top are aggregating data across thousands and thousands of orders. Customers with over ten thousand orders will see the biggest gains.
• Customers Grid - a collection of miscellaneous improvements improve the loading times on this page. While the difference may not be readily apparent, this also frees up processing power for the rest of the app.