Product Updates

We've added a new field to the Invoice Summary Report so that you can now see the total with tax added.

One of our most requested features! Our Quickbooks Online integration will now sync updates to POs and Invoices when the price has been changed in Fulcrum. This means that changes made will sync into QBO when changes are made, simplifying your workflow. Previously, price changes would need to be made in both Fulcrum and QBO independently. To turn on this setting, go into your integrations settings (Business Setup > System Data > Integrations). This new setting will only apply to POs and Invoices created after the feature has been turned on.

Now you can add a note when doing an inventory adjustment. This will give you additional visibility and records on inventory transactions and adjustments in the items page.

We've made some back-end improvements to the loading speeds on both the Real Time Operations Report and Scheduler. Additionally, improvements were made to the overall performance of the schedule. These updates will provide you with quicker load times so that you can get the information you need faster.

Similar to our work on the grids throughout Fulcrum, we’re also working on updates to our forms that you’ll start to see throughout the site. This month we rolled out a fresh vendor and customer forms. Expect improved performance, zero ‘time-outs’, cleaner interfaces, as well as changes to optimize for fewer clicks.

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You can now partially receive items from outside processing to be added to inventory immediately, and can be used on the job. Before this update, partially received items weren’t accounted for in inventory and weren’t available to be used on a job. Now you’ll be able to begin work on a job while awaiting the remaining items.

When creating sales orders, you can now see the customer’s outstanding balance and receive a warning when the sales order is sent and will push them over their set credit limit. This new warning will help everyone on your team have better visibility into your customers’ current standing when taking on new orders. 

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We’ve added the ability to print both raw material and job labels directly from Job Tracking. This will allow your operators to re-label materials that go back on the shelf when unused, as well as label items that are for a specific job so that you’ll always know what’s been made. 

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We’ve added options for Returns and Warranty as NCR types to give better visibility and help you track these processes within your shop.

We’ve added more options for the email addresses that show up on PDFs generated throughout Fulcrum, including Quotes, Sales Orders, Purchase Orders, Pack Lists and Certifications. You can have the email default to the creator of the document, or add a different default email address. To configure, go to Business Setup > System Data > PDFs & Email, select the template you’d like to update and choose an option from the dropdown menu.

We’ve added even more data to the job log. Now the job log will capture status changes, as well as who changed the status and when the change was made. This will give you more visibility as the job progresses and once it is completed. 

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The Real Time Operations Grid now shows you quantity completed and quantity required for the job. Now you can use this data to compare with the timer and gauge progress.

We’ve added more customization options to our Shopify integrations. You can choose to use “Available” rather than “On-hand” inventory when updating your Shopify inventory. Additionally, if you have multiple Shopify stores, you can choose to update each store separately using Fulcrum inventory locations. Both of these settings can be configured in your Shopify integration page. 

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We’ve added new settings to our ShipStation integration to allow you to specify the status of a sales order when creating via ShipStation. Now you can also mark sales orders complete after fully shipping them via webhook.

We know that your customer’s often make changes to orders after they’re in progress. To make this easier for you to manage, we’ve added the ability to make changes to sales order line items after the order has been marked sent, as long as no job is associated with the items being removed. Now you can remove the item from the sales order or make changes as needed to the BOM and routing and then add it back to the sales order. The other option would be to make changes at the job level or delete the job and re-create it.

As you saw in our last update, we’ve been rolling out updated grids throughout the site. This month we redesigned four more grids – NCR, CAPA, Receiving and Purchase Order grids. Expect improved performance, zero ‘time-outs’, cleaner interfaces, advanced filtering, and new key performance indicators at the top.

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We launched our Fulcrum community to a select group of users this month! This gives us the opportunity to hear directly from our users and gain valuable insights, as well as provides a place for our users to share information and best practices - both about using Fulcrum and the manufacturing industry as a whole. We'll be continuing to add Fulcrum users to this community as we grow. If you're interested in joining, reach out to your customer success manager!

Now you can add a default tax code at the customer level, so when a quote or sales order is created for that customer the correct tax code will automatically pull through.

We’ve added additional data downloads to help with month-end accounting needs. These reports can be found in the Accounting module, under Reporting.

We’ve added an option to hide items with a quantity of 0 from the pack list that were included in a sales order, but haven’t shipped yet. This essentially gives you the option to display either all items from the order on the packing slip (even those that have not shipped), or display only the items being shipped in that particular shipment. This can be enabled through Business Setup > System Data > PDFs & Email > Packing Slips.

You can now add custom fields to jobs through the details tab on the Jobs page. The added fields can be viewed in the Job Tracker under the details tab which will help you capture any custom fields added to quotes or sales orders to be visible to operators. To setup custom fields, go to Business Setup > System Data > Custom Fields and select Job as the module.

Users can now reopen jobs that were closed at a quantity of 0. Jobs can be reopened from the job tracker using the “Reopen Operation” button or from the Job’s page with a newly added “Reopen Job” option. This is currently limited to only jobs that were closed at a quantity of 0 as the downstream implications of cascading inventory adjustments is much more contained in this scenario. Future updates to come to allow more adjustments post job completion.

In June, we launched our first ever in-app feedback survey to our customers! We received so much valuable feedback from our users, and are currently reviewing the feedback to identify areas for improvement. Stay tuned in the coming weeks to see some updates!

We’ve made some enhancements to the look and feel of several grids throughout our site, including Customers, Vendors, Purchase Orders, Sales Orders, and Shipping. You'll see improved design and usability, enhanced performance, and some new functionality like key KPI information at the top and new ways to filter data. You'll see this same overhaul on several other grids over the next few weeks!

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This update allows for multiple users to enter responses on the same In-Process Tracking checkpoint in the Job Tracker. Current default functionality allows for multiple users to enter responses on different checkpoints, but only 1 response can be logged per checkpoint and users can see each other's entries. This new setting allows responses to be recorded per user and are all available in the job log. The operators will also not be able to see each other’s responses in the Job Tracker. The different approaches here are really a business preference in how you want data logged when there are multiple people working on things together. This feature can be enabled through Business Setup > System Data > Job Tracking Setup. For any advice on setup or changes to your process, consult your launch or success manager. Check out our Loom video to see how this works!

It's not uncommon to need to make a change to the list or amount of required materials after the job has already started. We've made some updates to the job page to allow for adding and removing buy items from the required materials list for jobs that are in progress. This will ensure purchasing recommendations are correct and that operators are seeing the correct information in the Job Tracker.

You can now search attachments on a job from within the operator view. This is helpful for users who have a lot of attachments for items, helping them find the exact attachment they need quickly. This search function uses the title of the attachment.

We’ve added a setting for margin-based pricing, which allows you to price based on your desired margins on the items page or at the item level within sales orders and quotes. When the cost of an item is updated, you’ll be prompted to recalculate the price. When margin-based pricing is set, your margin will stay the same and the price will update to reflect the change.

We had a lot of requests for this one, and it’s finally ready for you to use: Now you can send emails with attachments directly from Fulcrum! You’ll be able to customize your messages and attach documents generated by Fulcrum – like quotes and sales orders – as well as upload and attach additional files. This should help streamline the work for anyone that sends documents to customers or vendors.

You can also set up email templates specific to quotes, invoices, etc.

This functionality is available in the Sales, Purchasing, and Accounting modules.You can activate this new feature with our setup guide.

We’ve added a setting to our scheduler functionality to account for customer-supplied material. Previously, the scheduler had a setting that would only account for purchased material. Now, with both settings enabled, jobs will not be scheduled until customer-supplied materials are received as well. This will be helpful to account for delays and also keep your schedule up-to-date and running efficiently. These settings can be enabled in Business Setup > System Data > Scheduling > Scheduler Settings.

Because every shop wants different information on their customer-facing documents, we’ve added a setting in Business Setup to allow custom fields to be added to PDFs. Custom fields can be set up in Business Setup > System Data > Advanced > Custom Fields. Here, you can add custom fields related to different sections of your Fulcrum site and add customized line items to PDFs such as Quotes, Sales Orders, Purchase Orders, and Packing Slips. You may need to work with your launch or customer success manager to activate custom fields for your site.

We have added error notifications specific to our integration with Quickbooks Online. These error messages will be triggered when there are problems with the sync between systems and will typically inform you how to fix the error.

You now have the ability to flag certain items as “build to stock.” This will route job creation for this item to the demand planning section. If your site is configured to automatically generate jobs for every sales order line item, items with this flag will be excluded from that logic. Instead, the job for the stock items will be generated via the demand planning module.

Additionally, if an item is flagged as “build to stock” and is a subcomponent on a new job, the “to make” recommendation of that subcomponent will be set to 0, and a recommendation to make a new stock job will show up within the demand planning module.

This update is particularly useful when making customized subcomponents for an item. Items can now be created as “build to stock,” which will help keep the data our demand planning module needs clean and accurate.

We’ve added a continuous flow process for production. This flow allows items to move through production as they are individually completed, rather than waiting for a full batch to be done. This new feature will allow for items to move more efficiently through your shop, especially in cases where one work center is a bottleneck for downstream processes. The feature can be turned on in business setup.

To help you see costs more clearly and quote more accurately, we’ve introduced a new method to break out machine, labor, and overhead rates within Fulcrum. Previously, work centers used a blended rate of machine and labor costs, but now users can see more detailed job-costing information by breaking out the labor and machine estimates. This way, you can track machine and labor time separately to ultimately arrive at more accurate job costs for complex jobs or for machines that can run lights out.To take advantage of this new feature, flag work centers and the associated operations that you’d like to track machine time against in your business setup. This will enable machine time estimates on the associated BOM/Routings and tracking of machine time in the job tracker.

We’ve made some key changes to the way Fulcrum recognizes customizations to items on sales orders and quotes that will help shops that use some customized components and some from stock.

Fulcrum now identifies the specific layer of the BOM/routing that was customized, allowing the system to give better “to make” recommendations on the job for the non-customized portions of the job.

The “to make” roll-up on a job looks at all of its subcomponents, existing inventory, and demand across other jobs, and comes up with a recommended quantity of the subcomponent to make.

The system now understands specifically which subcomponent was customized — meaning it cannot be pulled from stock — and which were not customized and could be pulled from stock. This will help streamline your review process and enable the system to give you better recommendations.

We’ve added a feature to download reporting data from the Jobs, Sales Order, and Invoice pages. These downloads will provide you with year-to-date overviews in an Excel spreadsheet. The downloads can be found at the top of the pages for Jobs and Sales Order pages, while the Invoice report can be found within the Reporting section of the Accounting module. The downloads will be available to admin users.

When quotes and sales orders are categorized as won or lost, the cost information is now locked at the time the BOM and routing information is locked. Before this update, the costing information would pull the most current pricing information with no historical data. This will give you an accurate, historical view of your quoting and sales order activities.

Fulcrum users can now update their own company data within Business Setup. This means that you can make any changes to your company data directly through your Fulcrum site, rather than going through your launch or customer success manager.

We’ve added a new function to mark items as single-use when creating a quote and a new indicator on the items page. Before this visual indicator, items would be archived once a sales order was closed without a way to identify that the item had historically been single-use. For our customers that are consistently using single-use items, this creates a cleaner view in the items grid.

We've made continued improvements to associated purchase orders directly to jobs. The grid now provides you with even more information including POs for outside processing steps and other POs created from the job, PO status, and received status. This will give you a more holistic view of purchasing related to specific jobs, and give more actionable information at a glance.

It can be difficult to accurately track scrap material for shops that have complex jobs with operations running over multiple days or weeks. To help keep track of scrap over these long-run operations, we added the ability to log any scrap for the operation while the job is being worked. This will give you a more accurate and timely view of how much is being scrapped and give you a chance to make any necessary changes.

When using work orders, you can now pick materials related to a job rather than items tied directly to a routing step. In the Job Tracker, when job tracking against a work order, team members will now see the materials associated with the underlying jobs all organized by Job ID. The goal here is to create a more streamlined flow when setting up work orders and to make it easier for operators to efficiently pick the items that they need to complete it.

Fulcrum users can now create fully custom sized labels for items and jobs. Before, users had to select from three available size options, but now you can select any size that makes sense for your business. The free-form sizing can be found and updated in System Data, where you can set default sizing for small, medium, and large label sizes. This allows for more flexibility to fit your shop's specific needs.

We’ve added the option to copy in-process tracking steps to make them easier to duplicate within a job’s routing step, and you can also more easily re-order the steps. This should help create a more efficient flow when editing routing steps.

We’ve added a feature to “Pick All” inventory for a job, as well as a warning when items have not been picked. This will help ensure that no items are missed during the operations and streamline the picking process.

This new feature is designed to make it easier for Fulcrum users to tie purchase orders directly to a job, meaning the materials ordered for a specific job will be allocated specifically to it rather than entering general inventory. This adds a new level of visibility throughout Fulcrum by tying in the job ID to the purchase order and shows the associated job at time of receiving. Additionally, all purchase orders related to a job will now show on the jobs page.

You can now bulk export all documents associated with a job in a convenient zip file. This is particularly useful if you need to keep track of certifications. The bulk export will deliver all your underlying material certifications.

Within Fulcrum setup, you can now add default units of measure and times to your operations. This will help to create efficiencies when creating BOM/Routing steps on items, allowing you to pre-fill from established defaults rather than manually entering each time.

This new option within Fulcrum allows you to enable a default setting to invoice only items that have shipped rather than the entire ordered quantity. This is particularly useful if you ship a lot of partial orders. This is an optional setting that can be turned on in App Settings.

With the start of the new year, you're likely venturing into the warehouse to do a physical inventory check or stock take.That's why we pushed hard to make sure our stock take feature was ready for the spotlight as early in the year as possible.

Our new stock take feature allows users to download a simple spreadsheet of inventory as it stands in Fulcrum today, update the counts as necessary, and upload the revisions back into Fulcrum. The process is quick, clear, and ensures that what you see in the system perfectly matches what you've got in inventory.

Want to see it in action? Alex Troesch, our head of product, made a video to show you how to take advantage of this new feature.

With raw material pricing and the supply chain constantly in flux, we’ve added the ability to override material values when quoting. This new setting enables the use of current vendor pricing rather than the value of existing inventory, allowing you to plan for future jobs and not take the current inventory value into account.

The setting can be turned on by your Launch or Customer Success Manager.

We’ve introduced the ability to change equipment while an operation is in progress. We know that production plans can change and that you need a system that can adapt as quickly as you do. If the equipment in an operation needs to change, it will now automatically update the scheduler with the new capacity.

When preparing to ship items, you can now make changes within the shipping records — including adding customer notes and updating packing slips — without actually shipping the item. This will allow users to have a smoother workflow within this module.

This enhancement will allow you to require in-process checkpoints be completed prior to completing the operation as a whole. This removes a workaround where operations could be advanced without completing the prerequisite tasks. Fulcrum users will have better control over processes and can ensure operations are completed to their standards.

Our newly redesigned items page is all about making life easier for manufacturers.

We started by completely rethinking the user interface, making it cleaner, organized more logically, and easier to navigate. Just like our jobs tracking and job costing page renovations, we focused on removing as much fluff as possible, giving you the information you need without overwhelming you.

Now, without a second glance, you’ll get key information like how many of an item you have, how many are not tied to specific jobs and available for use, how much the inventory is worth, and how many you’ll likely need to order soon.

You’ll be able to quickly change whether you stock a part to inventory, whether it’s made in-house or purchased from an outside vendor, whether it requires lot tracking and more with a quick swipe, meaning you have the flexibility to adapt to changing conditions in your shop or anywhere in your supply chain.

But we didn’t just reimagine what was there, we listened hard to how our current customers thought about items and what information they needed on the spot.

So we added new elements like showing all the other items that are using that item, its purchase history, sales and quote history.

And, to keep the most frustrating mistakes to a minimum, we’ve added a save warning to let you know if you’re navigating away from the page without saving the changes you’ve made.

The page is a look into the full life cycle of any specific item you have, from the moment it’s purchased to the point at which it leaves your shop in new form.

Take a look at the video below from Emily, one of our product managers, for a great walk through of what you can find on the new page and where to find it.

To help you trace inventory, you can now autogenerate lot IDs based on configurable variables like date and purchase order ID. Head to the system setup to configure this feature.

In an effort to both help you reach your sustainability goals and monitor your costs more effectively, we’ve changed the flow to record scrap material. Before, you had to show that rework was happening to record the scrap, but we know that’s not always the cause of scrap creation, so now operators can record it at the job level whether rework is happening or not.

Our current purchasing planning algorithm looks across all jobs, your current schedule, inventory levels, minimum requirements, and incoming purchase orders to give you a recommendation on what to buy on a shop-wide basis. We’re hearing more and more that some teams prefer to order on a job-by-job basis, so we’ve made the necessary changes on our end to make that possible.

On the job level, you’ll now see how much is required, get a purchasing recommendation, and start creating purchase orders all from the job page — the recommendation will still take into account all the data it was using before, this is just a different workflow to get there. You won’t miss out on bulk discounts or end up with too much on order.

Sometimes you need to ship while some quantity of the job is still in progress. Now, on the final operation step, you’ll have the ability to add some portion into inventory in order to ship immediately. The rest of the job will stay open and running until it’s done, but you’ll be able to pick and pack what is ready to go. This is another feature that must be configured in the system setup. If this applies to you, head over to the system setup and turn this functionality on under 'job tracking setup'.

In cases where a job has outside processing as the first or only operation, the system will show your shipping team all the raw materials needing to be picked, their locations, and give them the ability to pick the raw material. This change streamlines workflows so you don’t need to go into the job tracker to pick.

To prevent jobs from being accidentally marked complete before they’ve actually fully run, we’ve added a second prompt to make sure there wasn’t an accidental press of the button.

More than ever, consumers are looking for a way to buy products online, even in B2B settings with industrial goods. To ensure your business is ready to sell and deliver whatever your customers want to buy, however they want to buy it, we’re introducing fulfillment as a way to easily ship a high volume of goods either produced custom or shipped directly from inventory.

Just as with production, jobs are automatically balanced between fulfillment stations for a smooth workflow, and the user interface makes it easy for the fulfillment team to see what has been packed and what still needs to be added to the box before it goes out. When everything is green, it’s good to go!

Best of all, there’s seamless flow between inventory, production, fulfillment, and shipping as well as integrations with ecommerce providers like Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce and shipping options like ShipStation and Shippo.

Whether you’re already shipping a high volume of goods and want to smooth out your workflow or you’d like a better sense of how fulfillment might fit into your current process, talk to your launch team member and they can walk you through the set-up and get you up and running in no time.

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We made a major push to support currency conversions across the entire application. For anyone that needs to account for multiple currencies in their business, we’ve added the ability to set default currencies for your customers and vendors.

Once you set their currency of choice, it will automatically show up on quotes, sales orders, purchase orders, and invoices, but be converted back to your home currency on all reporting and grids. Best of all, we’re converting currency in real-time based on live exchange rates, so you’ll never have to manually calculate it again!

This feature requires some quick setup from your launch team member, so please reach out to them if this interests you.

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For businesses that receive a lot of the same item from the same vendor, now you can store their UPC code for the item within Fulcrum. This update will make scanning items in when they arrive even quicker and decrease the likelihood of receiving the wrong item into the system.

Since the purchase order that began the receiving process likely had the vendor’s preferred unit of measurement on it, we’ve made it possible to also receive in the same UoM. This will keep the back end of the system nice and tidy while giving the employee scanning in received material one less thing to worry about.

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At the other end of the manufacturing process, when things are ready to ship out, we’ve added several quality of life updates to the shipping module. You can now add locations to the line items within the shipping interface, sort locations alphabetically, scan the item to open the line item and mark fully shipped, and scan in the lot to pick specifically from that lot.

As with the receiving changes, these were implemented to speed up the process while decreasing the likelihood of any errors creeping.

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To make moving jobs forward quick and painless, we’ve added a multi-select option on the jobs page as well as the ability to change the status of multiple jobs at once.

Whether you’re approving a big batch of orders or putting a bunch of new jobs on the schedule all at the same time, now you can do it without going into each individual job, saving time.

This is the first implementation of this type of mass update functionality that we plan to expand across the application. Expect more of this to come!

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We continue to take a deep dive into every single segment of Fulcrum, working to make sure that each section contains the right data and that anyone using it can get the information they need quickly and without digging.

The goal with the new layout of the jobs page was to condense the most critical information together for easy viewing and to connect it to our real-time engine to ensure that the data is as accurate as possible at the exact moment it's needed.

We believe this will give production managers and those looking at job progress a level of insight they haven't had before and with no additional work on their part.

Alex Troesch, our head of product, has once again put together a quick tutorial on what's new and how it all works.

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We’ve added workflows throughout the system to better handle returns and refunds both in terms of what gets brought back to you and what you send back to vendors and suppliers, including financial reconciliation and reason codes to better keep track of issues. We also added a workflow in the invoicing section to ensure the refund you issue is accounted for in the system. Our goal is to give you the most complete picture of your shop’s flow as possible and while returns and refunds aren’t a huge component of that, they are a critical one both from a financial standpoint and a quality management perspective.

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For high-compliance industries, pulling together all the material certifications for a particular job can be tedious. That’s why we’ve added functionality to tie all the certifications for a job into one pdf, automatically. Certificates will correspond to lots and can be added during receiving or after the fact on the item. When completing a job, the system will look at all the material lots used and automatically pull together all the associated certifications giving you quick traceability.

This will save a lot of time for people doing compliance checks, during audit season, or if a customer has follow-up questions.

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Sometimes work needs to start on one machine, but move to another to best use your shop’s available resources, so we’re accommodating that with our new split scheduler. You’ll be able to set which operations can be split and the quantity they should be split in and our scheduler will do the rest.

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While we still believe the future of scheduling is automated and algorithmic, we understand that sometimes a quick manual adjustment to the schedule will help you get your shop back on track. To accommodate those needs, we’ve added the ability to drag and drop objects within the schedule to give you that flexibility, but only for changes in the near-term schedule so as not to create cascading issues later on. You can also cancel jobs, set up new ones, and change operations as necessary, and the rest of the schedule will adapt to whatever changes you make, optimizing the rest of the jobs to keep everything flowing smoothly. The path to every job being on-time has some sudden turns, now you can handle them with ease. This feature requires a bit of setup from your launch team member, so please reach out to them if you're interested in implementing this immediately.

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We’re now offering clearer workflows for companies that invoice customers before work begins instead of invoicing after work has been completed. To take advantage of this feature, indicate that a deposit is required on the sales order and the amount. This will kick off an invoice for the deposit upfront.

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The new blanket order feature will streamline the workflow of order entry, production, shipping, and invoicing for large quantity orders with multiple releases. Use the "blanket order" item type on any sales order to add a release schedule and easily keep track of the quantity produced, shipped, and invoiced against the total order quantity.

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We’ve built out additional functionality in the rework workflow to allow users to indicate not only that something needs rework, but also what step specifically needs to be redone and how many parts are affected. This automatically creates a new operation for those parts, which allows for better tracking of additional material and labor costs associated with the rework.

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Not every customer buys in the same way, so we’re making it easier to customize the unit of measurement during the sales process. You can set different units of measure and custom conversions for sales and inventory or set customer-specific units for repeat customers that have consistent needs, whatever best suits your shop’s needs.

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Circumstances change, sometimes on short notice, and the schedule needs to adapt to that. Now, you can make really detailed changes to the schedule, including accounting for modified shift start or end time and maximum equipment capacity adjustments to the day.

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We believe market-based pricing is the best way to maximize income into your shop, but there are certain types of manufacturing that are more closely tied to the cost-plus model of pricing. To make sure we’re not leaving anyone behind, we’ve added functionality for calculating price based on margin inputs. The pricing takes into account the cost to produce an item and calculates a price based on your margin requirement. As the cost changes, the price will change. This method can be used on price breaks, quotes, sales orders, and in the item setup itself.

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We’ve updated our operation instructions fields to support external hyperlinks to additional documents or instructions from the Job Tracker. We know there's other spots you may be storing key information and can now make sure it's easy to access for your team.

As with everything we do, we want the job tracker to be easy to use, incredibly powerful, and help everyone from the shop floor to the back office take advantage of modern technology to make their work better, easier, and more satisfying.

Job tracking in Fulcrum was already one of our best-loved features, so why did we rebuild it from the ground up?

Simple: We knew it could be better and we weren’t satisfied with leaving it at less than the best.

The new interface — designed based on the feedback we received from users — puts the focus on what individual operators need to do, while giving them access to the schedule as a whole as well. Within each job, the drawings take center stage: 3D renderings and static images now show up big and bright, and users can spin them or zoom in for finer details.

Take a look at the video below as Alex Troesch, our head of product, demonstrates how easy and intuitive the new job tracker is:

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Whether you need in-process data for ISO certification, GMP standards, or any other type of quality management record-keeping, Fulcrum makes that process easy for operators to record and monitor, and easy to compile for later audits.

These quality checkpoints are often exactly what keeps companies from going digital, so this is a huge step forward in digital quality management and we’re excited to be leading in this way.

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It would be great if work flowed from one machine to the next, with no breaks for movement or additional processes between stations, but that’s not exactly how most shops work. So, to account for the realities of moving big pieces between stations or factors like drying time, we’ve added buffer times to operations.

You’ll be able to preset buffer times at the operation level, which means for repeatable times you’ll only have to do it once. However, since some times will change based on part size or other factors, we’re giving you the ability to select whether that time can be overridden. If so, users will have the option to change it during the BOM and routing set up.

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One of our most asked-for features is now part of Fulcrum! From the pricing page, you can now set prices based on quantity ordered, so if you’re a business that offers bulk discounts, this is a way to communicate that information both to your customers and to the system.

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Think of this as a companion to the real-time operations report we released last month: At a glance, you’ll be able to see who is clocked in, what job they’re clocked into, and how long they’ve been working on it compared to the estimated time. This is a great way for managers and owners to see what’s running long, who is working efficiently, and who could benefit from additional help or oversight.

This will work for every Fulcrum user, but there are aspects of it that will be less useful for those not currently using the time clock feature within Fulcrum. If you’d like to move onto Fulcrum time — which will easily integrate with your current payroll system — let your launch team member know and they’ll get you set up!

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Even the most diligent of users sometimes forget to clock out for the day or clock out of the job they just completed. To help keep your data accurate and save you time on data corrections, you'll be able to stop the timer from the real-time personnel report. Managers can find this option exclusively on the real-time personnel report to start, but we will be expanding it to other sections in the coming months.

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Our new invoicing grid is designed to improve the workflow of anyone that has to deal with getting cash in the door. At the very top of the page, you’ll get an actionable dashboard showing where each invoice is in the process, as well as everything that has been paid or remains unpaid. Mouse over the red square (or press on mobile) within the unpaid invoice section and you’ll see the maturity of every outstanding invoice as well as who it was issued to.

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Once again, we’re giving you the ability to get the real-time information you need as quickly as possible. With the new jobs grid, you’ll be able to see what is waiting to be reviewed, what jobs are currently in progress, and what jobs are late — and how late they are. With the newly added progress bars, you’ll even be able to get a feeling for what’s about to happen on the floor based on what’s about to finish on a machine. This may not look like a crystal ball, but you’ll still feel like you can see the future!

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We’ve retooled the algorithm behind purchasing to give you an even better plan for what to buy and when. Fulcrum takes into account current inventory levels, when materials are needed based on the schedule, the historical lead time of your vendors, what's already coming in on other purchase orders, any minimum stocking levels, and vendor price breaks stored in the system, and comes up with a recommendation of how much to buy today.

Along with a more robust back end, we’ve updated the front end to give you the ability to switch the entire planning page to see it in your vendor’s unit of measurement and added item tags here for enhanced searchability.

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Since processes like drying don’t require constant supervision and don’t take up machine time, we’re giving you the option to set certain work areas as having unlimited capacity. This, along with the unattended run option we debuted earlier this year, should make it possible to set up a run that does not take into account either personnel or machine availability.

As always, we’re here to help! If something in an update like this sounds interesting to you, but doesn’t match with how your shop is running right now, touch base with your launch team member and we’ll be happy to help think through with you whether it’s a good fit and how to get it implemented if it is.

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To help you get the information you need from Fulcrum as quickly as possible, we've updated the look of some of our most popular sections. Starting with quoting — which you can see below — we're improving the grids in Fulcrum to prioritize key information and communicate it more clearly. We'll be updating the whole system over the next few weeks, adding more insights, clearer callouts, and denser data, so keep an eye out for that!

Reports show you what has happened, real-time data gives you the ability to react to what's actually happening and make changes as needed. Our real-time operations view shows what's scheduled for the day on the shop floor, what jobs are late, what excess capacity you have, and more, and it's all filterable and searchable. This is the difference between driving a car using the rear-view mirror and looking out the actual windshield.

Sometimes a piece isn't up to your standards and needs to be reworked, that's life. Now, Fulcrum handles reworked pieces smoothly and easily, allowing operators to flag that rework on a job is required, reopen an operation, and add specific notes about what is required. This will allow you to track for your own internal quality purposes or for ISO compliance.

You've likely run into a job that seemed straightforward on the surface only to have it turn out to be far more complex than they appeared. These PDF updates were that type of a job for us, so we're excited to finally get them to you!

We've updated our PDFs to be cleaner and clearer starting with quotes and sales orders. Expect updates to all pdfs in the next couple of weeks. We've added the ability to update the legal and notes sections, and we're in the process of adding more customization options for you to do on your own. In the short term, reach out to your launch team member if you'd like to make color changes to the document.

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Our barcoding system has always been a great way to track inventory and raw materials, but we've made accessing it even more convenient! Right from the job tracking page, users will now be able to scan labels as well as print new ones when necessary. So, if you've got a long pick list of raw materials, you can scan the label from the job tracker to quickly add it to what you're working on.

Finally, we're adding QR search capability gradually to more and more grids. If you see the QR code icon next to a grid in Fulcrum, it means you can scan a QR code into that search bar!

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Whether you’re sending quotes, sales orders, purchase orders, or invoices, you can do it right from within Fulcrum thanks to a new email integration. Anywhere you see a pdf, you'll now see a new email button along with the download and print buttons you've always had. The email will come from your normal account and still show in your outbox, but now you’ll no longer need to save a PDF and then attach it within the standalone email program.

The system will use whichever email system you have set up, either as its own program or within your browser, and will automatically fill in a template for you to use, which can be customized to fit your business in the system data setup. The templates for the emails can be created in the system setup section of Fulcrum by anyone with access. Have no fear, you'll still be able to give it a last look before pressing send, so if you catch something you want to change, you can.

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Whether you need photo documentation of processes and products for certification and audit purposes or just have a customer that really likes to see how production is going, now you can take and upload photos right from the job details page. The photos will stick with the job as an attachment within Fulcrum, ensuring everyone from the floor to the front office has access to them when they need them.

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Fulcrum helps you price the products you're selling to your customers, but the other key element of pricing is how much you're paying your vendors for the material you need. We've updated the system to not only store the contracted prices or price breaks you've gotten from your preferred vendors on your purchase orders, but also to help advise you on how much to buy based on the PO quantity and the jobs you have scheduled.

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If you're finishing a piece supplied by a customer or further adding to a piece that's in process before sending it back to them, a receiving record will now be automatically created for every piece in the BOM supplied by a customer. This way, everyone on the team knows what should be arriving in your facility soon and your production team will know when something finally arrives once the receiving team has scanned it in.

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You can now mark shifts and departments as unavailable to help account for planned maintenance, holidays, known staff outages, etc. This will keep your schedule as up-to-date as possible and help you account for the days and shifts work will actually get done, rather than holding your team to an idealized version of the time allotted.

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Since our work order function was released at the end of 2020, we've been working to make it an even more powerful planning and scheduling tool. The work orders page will now include suggestions of similar operations for you to group together as well as include the ability to group entire jobs onto work orders.

We've also taken steps to streamline the work order creation process and given you the ability to change details right from the work order creation screen. Armed with these improvements, you'll be creating work orders and maximizing your throughput in no time!

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