Product Updates

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.

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.

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.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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