Product Updates
Weekly updates to Fulcrum, always included with your subscription.
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We’ve added new details for the cost of raw materials listed in the BOM & Routing cost breakdown. You’ll now see piece counts and their distinct costs which will highlight variance from the materials from inventory or vendors.
This breakdown can be see through the Total Cost link on a buy item.
Fulcrum Product Manager, Emily Ujifusa, shows us around recent updates to some of the most popular areas of Fulcrum, including:
In addition to an updated look and feel, the Operations Progress section now provides a couple of additional data points: the planned and actual time, as well as the planned and completed quantity. You can see these updates on each Job.
The Open Operations Tab shows one row per open operation that gives status, quantity, and scheduling details. This gives production managers key info on everything that needs to be worked in one place.
We’ve updated the Sales Order Status page for invoices, and you can now use all the same actions that can be used from the Invoicing Grid on the SO Status page. You can create, follow-up, issue, deposit, and view invoices right from the Sales Order Status page without having to navigate elsewhere.
If an Invoice was created without any Payment Terms, you can now select “Payment Terms” to easily update and recreate the Invoice.
If no payment terms were selected at the time of Invoice Creation, there will now be “Edit Payment Terms” text to indicate a selection of payment terms. If payment terms already exist in your system, you can edit them and remove their name and due dates, save, and then you will be presented with 'Edit Payment Terms' text to get the lookup modal for payment terms again. A note that this will only be visible when the Invoice can still be edited. If the Invoice has already been issued, you will not see the Edit text.
Makespan & Dwell Time reporting gives you a high-level view of your jobs’ active processing times and idle times, helping you to identify bottlenecks over time. The data shown populates when a job is completed and accounts for any time adjustments. To see a single month’s average makespan and dwell time, click on the bar of the corresponding month.
Makespan is the duration of a job, from the first clock into a job to when it’s completed.
Dwell Time is the total downtime within Makespan when a job has no operation running.
We’ve redesigned the Job Tracking panel to help keep the right information at your fingertips:
A) Recent gives you a quick overview of everything you’ve been working on.
B) @Mentions help show you any time someone else mentions you in a note.
C) Notes gives you an easy way to keep up with new messages on jobs you’ve worked on.
D) Review Timer History or Sign Out by opening the three dot menu.
We've introduced several enhancements to the throughput report:
1. You can now click select any of the months on the Year-To-Date chart to show details for that month (instead of the current month) in the KPIs and chart to the left.
2. Last-year comparison has been added for the selected month's Total Throughput KPI.
3. You can export month summaries for each month, this year and last year.
For customers using QuickBooks Online integrated with Fulcrum, we’ve added several more custom fields. For purchase order syncing, you can now map the Fulcrum Jobs to a custom field in Quickbooks. For invoice syncing, you can now map Fulcrum Packlist Number and Fulcrum Quote Number to a custom field in QuickBooks. The new fields can be configured in the QuickBooks settings page.
Now you can set how reserved inventory generates the shipment status in System Data! This is a helpful update for those who rely on reserved inventory. When this setting is on, shipment statuses will exclusively use the inventory reserved for that sales order to generate shipment status. When off, shipment statuses will be generated the same as stock items, marking those with the highest priority as ready first, followed by those with the earliest ship by dates.
You can now set up Accounting Code Descriptions in System Data > Tags for the 'Item Accounting Codes' category. Descriptions set up here will be available when picking an accounting code for an item on the Items page, Sales Order, Quote, Purchase Order, and Invoice.
The 'Sales Order Value by Status' graph on the Sales Order grid was updated to be more interactive and dynamic. You can now click into the different datasets and filter the grid based on the status and time frame selected on the graph.
Now you can generate and save filters in Job Tracking for yourself or team members. When a user logs in, the filters apply automatically so your team can see exactly what they need to work on. The “Create Filters” permissions in Business Setup enables users to create job tracking filters for other users.
You can now select “Attach to Associated Records” to have files from Sales Orders also appear on associated records including Quotes, Jobs, Shipping records and more.
You can now change a single field on the PO in the API without having to send the entire PO. Users can now also pull in an entire list of line items on the PO in summary format instead of having to call each line item separately.
On any Sales Order or Quote, a cost breakdown is calculated when an Item is added or the quantity is updated. This cost breakdown will not reflect changes to material costs that happen in between adding the line item to the SO and receiving new material at a different cost in inventory. If this were calculated with every material cost change across large BOMs, it would potentially slow down the system for some users. Knowing the true real-time cost breakdown is important of course, so we added the Refresh button. This will pull all the latest cost information while not slowing down performance.
We’re excited to bring you a new way to import data into Fulcrum! As you may have seen during implementations, data templates are a helpful way to organize and import data into Fulcrum. In this update we've expanded the functionality and visibility of the upload process in your Business Setup. We have several templates available, including Business Setup, Items, Vendors, Customers, and Sales Orders.
You can now add and modify default fees within your Sales setup. (A) Simply set the name, description, currency, tax, and accounting codes and you'll see the default options when adding a fee on a Quote or Sales Order. (B) Note that you'll only see fees that match the currency. You can override anything you want on the fly too, so if the fee amount saved in system data isn't what you want for this particular order, you can update it on the order but leave the default as is.
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Remembering to stop Job Tracking timers can get overlooked at the end of a long day. To help, we added a "Stop All" button on Real Time Personnel that lets you bulk-stop all setup and labor timers. This is the latest update for several upgrades to make job tracking even more seamless in your workflows.
The new Shop Throughput report shows monthly totals and averages for throughput as well as the number of jobs completed. You can see month-to-month trends, and this report is interactive, so you can click on a month and get a breakdown of what was Started, Added, Completed, and Ending in that month.
For current Fulcrum customers, contact your Launch or Customer Success Manager to turn on this report.
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From the list of Jobs we've added three critical pieces of information at a glance. First, you can now see which operation a job is on, as well as a count of how many operations are finished compared to the total operations. Second, you'll see the quantity of items completed on each job compared to the total needed. Third, the status bar now shows how many hours a job has been worked on, the percentage complete, and the total hours from the estimate.
All of this data is pulled live from job tracking so you'll have a current view of what's happening, now with even more critical data in one view.
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The new Sales Order Status tab provides a full interactive view of any records associated with your Sales Orders. See the progress of associated jobs, whether purchase orders have been received or late, whether invoices have been issued or paid, and shipping status all in one intuitive place.
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Now in addition to adding certificates for items as they are received, you can add certs directly to Items. You'll now have the option to add a cert to an existing lot from the item's page directly, or create a Purchase Order and add the cert when the item is received.
The new Equipment Utilization heat map view gives you a live, clear visualization of how much a piece of equipment is being used. This report is included in an expanded reports section of Production in Fulcrum.
Key focuses here: ease-of-use, quality, and reporting! In this edition of "Fulcrum in 4," Product Director Alex Troesch walks us through all that's new, including:
Now you can make your chat and notes in Fulcrum even more conversational with @ mentions. When adding a note in the Job Tracker, simply type @ and the user's name, select the person you want to tag and enter your message. The person that is tagged will see the mention count in Job Tracking (A) and in the Jobs view (B).
Creating and updating BOM & Routing just got easier! Now you can search for items and operations and drag them directly into the BOM & Routing editor. You can also drag and drop to re-order operations and update When you save, your costs and material availability summaries will update too.
The updated key metrics for Sales Orders show your top customers and sales people by dollars sold. We've also added an at-a-glace view of your Sales Order value and status for upcoming months.
With new Item Audit Logs, you can now review the changes made to any Item, including who made the change, what was changed, and when. Please note that at this time, we are capturing audit data with technical bits of code in them as well, so work with your Launch or Customer Success Manager if you need help translating what you see.
We've added a new Purchasing Planning view for Outside Processing. The extends the seamless workflows and visibility from purchasing planning throughout other areas of Fulcrum to purchase smarter and faster. The grid will have filtering and KPIs to help you drill in to actionable items.
This is a report download that lives under the data dropdown on the jobs grid. It has one row for each job (in scheduled, in progress, or hold status) and gives some basic job details as well as the latest activity logged for that job and a timestamp. This will download all open jobs in alpha-numeric order.
This new report is located under the Items & Inventory tab as “Inventory Value Report” and it will be able to pull the inventory values for any specified items at a specified date using inventory events. If no items or date are specified, the report will pull values for all items on the current date.
You can now configure the labels that are generated at receiving. In System Data -> Label -> Receiving Label, you’ll see label variables like item name, description, job name, quantity, and more (A). You can also refine parameters including font size, bold text, and if the QR code should show (B). These labels are currently available for receiving from purchase orders.
As a continuation of our rollout of job specific inventory, we've changed the way that inventory specific to sales orders is handled. It will now be treated as regular inventory, with a lot number automatically generated to distinguish it. This inventory will also have tags showing that it is reserved for a specific SO, and the tags will appear on shipping and picking.
You’ll notice that item name changes are no longer possible in Fulcrum. Previously, you could change the name, but the updated name wouldn’t carry through to other areas. Going forward, we’ll be updating item edit functionality to provide more flexibility and continuity.
You can now add certifications when receiving outside processing POs. Items must be lot tracked to add certificates. The certification will rollup to the job details certification tab, and to the item certification tab.
Check out our new video series Fulcrum in 4 where we'll highlight some of the most recent Fulcrum product updates! Watch our February wrap-up below where we dive into capable to promise calculations, live chat notifications, default margins, associated records on customers and vendors, new data downloads, and our public API.
We’ve made some improvements to the Job Tracking interface for our mobile users. It is more user friendly, with this update focusing on the operation list and pick menu.
We’ve added more currency codes throughout Fulcrum for users that use multiple currencies in the site. You’ll now see currency codes on PO, sales order, quote, and invoice PDFs. This will also show on vendor price breaks and in the vendor details section. This will help add differentiation for currencies with the same symbols, like USD and CAD.
When POs are auto-generated, users will now be able to swap the vendor it is assigned to. The purchase order will still automatically pull the item’s default vendor - but you will now be able to select a different vendor as long as the PO is still in draft mode.
We’ve added new KPIs to the vendors page for vendor quality, including a quality score for each vendor. This score will be calculated on on-time percentage and rate of issues with the vendor. This will help you evaluate your vendors and choose the best partners for your business.
We now have capacity visualization for the scheduler! The graphs will look at the four-week period and show the backlog of each department showing late and on-time jobs, as well as unused capacity.
We’ve added an option when editing items on the BOM that will allow you to add a fixed quantity requirement per job that won’t scale with the number of items that you’re making. As an example, if you require a certain amount of material to start a job whether making one or 100, the BOM can now accommodate that fixed quantity amount.
We've added a new setting to packslip configuration to show the sales order line item number. If you turn this setting on, instead of numbering the lines in the shipment by 1, 2, 3, etc, we will show the line item number from the sales order so that your customers can easily match up what's in the box to what they ordered. This can be turned on in System Data > PDFs & Email > Packing Slips.
Fulcrum users can now upload a profile picture that will show everywhere in Fulcrum. This feature will be particularly helpful in job tracking where we previously only showed user initials which could become confusing if multiple users had the same initials. Now users can add a unique image and help identify their own information faster.
You can now download data from the vendor grid to get a helpful list of all of your vendors used in Fuclrum.
When creating POs for outside processing vendors, you can now “select all” for line items for the same operations that you use that vendor for. This will allow you to save some time when issuing these types of purchase orders.
Purchase Orders can now have multiple jobs associated. Additional jobs can be added to the PO from the details The purchase order grid, jobs page, and receiving grid have all been updated to show a list of related jobs.
This new feature is for customers who have multiple companies set up in Fulcrum. Now you’ll be able to configure your PDF and email templates for each company.
Now you can enable a default margin setting for newly created items. This can be configured in Business Setup > System Data > Sales where you can enable the feature and set your default margin. The margin set here will also apply to price breaks on the item.
More downloadable data! You can now download data from the Items grid as well as download the scrap report.
Our public API is live and available on our website. This is something that we’ve had requested a lot! You can access the API docs here.
You can now view purchase orders and items by the vendor that they are related to. Two new tabs have been added to the Vendor page.
You can now view purchase orders and items by the vendor that they are related to. Two new tabs have been added to the Vendor page to make it easier to see a record of all POs issued to a vendor, as well as the items associated with that vendor.
We’ve added two new tabs to the job cost reporting download for operations and materials. Additionally building on a recently released feature, there’s now a download button on the costs tab from an individual job’s page. These new tabs will only be available on jobs created since December.
Operators can now scrap raw material from Job Tracking. There is now a dropdown to select whether the scrap is related to the raw material on the job or the item being made. Data entered here will pull through on the Job’s page and the material cost will use the unit value that is calculated when it is picked.
Another highly requested feature! Our Stock Take feature will now allow you to edit inventory values on upload. There are new columns on the template to accommodate this, and can be adjusted for a particular lot or location of material.
Operations will now be scheduled up until the point of scheduled downtime, to continue once the downtime period has ended. Previously, an operation would be scheduled to start after the downtime period was over.
Our integration with Acumatica can now support custom invoice and PO numbers!
You can now add a new vendor when creating a purchase order! This will help you work more efficiently in adding new vendors when you need them.
As a next step in our enhancement of the realtime notes feature, we’ve added a notification summary to the Jobs page. This will alert you to unread notifications for unread notes for jobs on the first page of the grid.
We’ve updated the design of our packlist to match the other documents that you generate within Fulcrum! This will give your documents a consistent look throughout the full Fulcrum experience.
Now you can export data from the Purchasing Planning and Demand Planning grids within Fulcrum. This data can help you to review historical data for purchasing and demand, and even track trends over time! The permissions for data downloads can be found in Business Setup > Permissions.
As we continue to expand our data downloads throughout Fulcrum, we’ve added new download functionality to the CAPA and Inventory Transaction grid. These downloads allow you to work with your data outside of Fulcrum!
Now you can add new customers directly from quotes or sales orders! This gives you more flexibility within Fulcrum and makes it easier to quote quickly.
The quotes and sales orders will now show a preview of file attachments - including 3D renderings!
Users will now be able to have permissions to edit only their own time management instead of only being able to edit all or nothing. This is broken up into either ability to edit all of your own time clocks or edit just your own job clocks. These permissions can be configured in Business Setup > Permissions.
The customer page now includes an associated records tab which will show the quotes and sales orders for the customer. This will help you see the sales history for your customers.
We’ve added new job cost information to the jobs page which will let you see cost breakdowns for the full job, as well as line item breakdowns.
The schedule now takes material associations into account at the operational level, rather than at the job level. Previously, jobs would not start until all material had been received, regardless of where the operation requiring the material fell. This will allow for increased efficiency for jobs to move through production.
You can now adjust the quantity to make on job labels from Job Tracking. This is to accommodate continuous flow, so operators can print a label that travels with a subset of the total quantity to make.
We’re continuing our work on improved picking in job tracking. Now, in job tracking we’ve added indicators to show if the correct amounts have been picked.
This has been a highly requested feature within Fulcrum! Now when a job has subcomponents, if the subcomponents are in stock they will be reserved for the job. An indicator will appear both on the item page. Additionally, you’ll see in job tracking if the inventory is reserved for another job it will have an indicator in the pick menu that the inventory is reserved.
We’ve added a setting to automatically turn on lot tracking for all newly created items. When enabled, the item creation will have the Lot Tracking toggle turned on. Additionally, we’ve added the lot tracking toggle to items created on quotes and sales orders.
We’re enhancing our in-app notes to be real time. This allows for real-time communication to the shop floor. The notes are available through job tracking and the jobs page and will have indicators when new messages are received. This is a great feature to help save time and improve communications within your shop!
You can now create single-use billing and shipping addresses on quotes and sales orders.
We’ve added even more customization to Fulcrum documents! Now when a dark color is selected for the document the font will automatically change to white.
The job tracking operations list now includes a material missing flag when an operation does not have the material required to complete it. This will only apply when the material is specifically for an operation. Additionally, if multiple operations require the same material the flag will not appear until available material has been picked on one of the operations.
This has been a highly requested feature! You’ll now be able to import routing steps and required items from another item’s BOM and routing. When you select a new item, you’ll see the additional steps added and can remove if needed.
You can now manage customer returns through Fulcrum! You could already add a refund to the sales order, now when you are refunding an item, you can also indicate a return. This will create a receiving record for the item being returned. Check out the below video for a walkthrough of this new feature.
It’s finally here! We’re launching the updated quotes interface to match our previously updated sales order page. With the update, you’ll see a cleaner UI and improved performance on the page. When adding items to a quote, you’ll be able to see related attachments and make changes to the BOM/routing. The new quotes page also features auto-save functionality.
We’ve added a setting that will allow users to view their own time management! Users can access this through Live > Time Management to view.
If a discount is applied to a quote line item, the margin listed in the quote's KPI will update to account for the discount. The margin in the main pricing section will remain unaffected by discounts.
This feature will automatically add new equipment to the department shift(s) of the relevant work center. If the department has multiple shifts, the equipment will add to each non-overlapping shift.
We’ve made some back-end performance improvements to the inventory transactions grid.
Users will now be able to add rework for operations on work orders. The rework will be specific to individual jobs within the work order. The button is on the details tab under each job specific dropdown and is available as long as the job is not completed.
As part of our continued work on data exports, you can now download data from the Work Order and Time Management grids.
Quotes and Sales Orders are now able to produce estimated completion dates! This new feature will look at the availability of the schedule at that moment and produce estimated completion dates based on the priority level of the job - taking into account the BOM and routings for all items on the quote or sales order.
We’ve done some work behind the scenes to improve the performance on work order picking. You should notice a faster experience when picking items for work orders.
Users can now open and preview job attachments directly from the operations list in Job Tracking. Additionally, this list will now show the quantity to make and quantity completed.
We’ve added permissions settings for existing reports and grid downloads. The permissions can be set at a page level. You can set the permissions in Business Setup > Permissions and then grant access by user role.
You can now download a report with in process tracking data! This report will pull data from the previous year. The report can be downloaded directly from the jobs grid or from the Quality tab of a specific job.
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A new Salesforce integration is available. The integration allows the creation of sales orders or quotes in Fulcrum to create accounts and opportunities in Salesforce.
This new setting for the schedule will take into account jobs that make subcomponents to stock when scheduling any jobs that consume them, and schedule accordingly. Operations that require a made to stock subcomponent will be scheduled after the expected completion date of enough required subcomponents. This is a schedule setting that can be enabled in Business Setup > System Data > Scheduling > Scheduler Settings.
This new feature will allow production to change the quantity of items to make from the pick menu in Job Tracking. This will automatically update the quantities that need to be picked. This allows for more flexibility and ease on the shop floor.
Users with schedule editing permissions can now unschedule operations that are in the freeze window. This change applies to operations that are not currently running, and will allow them to be rescheduled. This feature gives you more control and helps you to have a more accurate schedule.
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The details tab has had some design updates and now shows the quantity to be made. This update will make it easier for your production team to view the information they need.
We’ve made performance improvements to the Pick All function in Job Tracking.
We continue to improve our email feature! You can now include attachments from any related record when emailing a sales order. You already saw SO attachments as options when emailing – you will now also see attachments from any related record (jobs, items, etc.) to attach when sending the sales order.
From the sales order you can now refund all line items, including taxes and fees. Previously, you could only refund the item, but you can now refund other costs for a smoother workflow.
