Product Updates

Join Emily Lupico, Product Manager at Fulcrum, in our latest Fulcrum in 4, where we discuss recent Fulcrum updates. These enhancements revolve around two main themes: our Autoschedule and general product improvements. As a focal point of our platform, the Autoschedule is instrumental in driving efficiency for our customers. Emily takes you through editing the due date and priority level directly in the production scheduler, changes to downtime visibility, a new alert for a stale schedule, and incorporated continuous flow details inside the operation cards.

Finally, we'll explore the Equipment Utilization Report, updated with new filters for better insight into the efficiency of each piece of equipment, thereby helping you understand and manage capacity better.

All jobs which have the 'continuous flow' checkbox enabled on their routings will now have their operations overlap in the scheduler. 
This will only happen when the operations fit into the restrictions outlined in the outside processing. Operations in a process group, for outside processing, or those with fixed run times (not per-unit) will not be allowed to overlap. All other operations on a job with continuous flow checked will overlap. This is a simple version of continuous flow we will continue to make adjustments to improve.

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You can now upload your Bill of Materials (BOM) with our new BOM Importer. This release includes the ability to import a line item from the BOM during the Sales Order or Quote workflow. Users who have "Edit Item" permissions will be able to use this feature. This will eliminate some manual data entry and make creating BOM and Routings easier. We plan to continue to add additional functionality to the BOM Import over time.

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A check was added to see if a vendor is used on items before allowing the user to delete that vendor. It will also tell you how many items the vendor is being used on. This will eliminate issues caused when PO's are made for deleted vendors. Additionally, a banner was added to the top of the page for deleted vendors that allows users to more clearly tell if the vendor was deleted. If a vendor was deleted, you can now hit “Restore” and it will become available again.

You can now seamlessly transfer specific line items from a Quote to a new Sales Order, giving you more control over the items you want to include. This update will help you save valuable time and eliminate unnecessary line item deletions during the Sales Order creation process. Just pick the desired line items from the Quote that you want to go to a new Sales Order.

To do this, open a quote, set the status of the quote to "Won" and elect to convert the quote to a sales order. A new dialog window will appear listing all the line items on the quote. Each line item will be selected by default. Click on the switch next to the line item to unselect it.

You can convert the quote to a Sales Order as many times as you wish even after the quote is won.

Similar to the Sales area of Fulcrum, you'll now be able to see previous orders in Quoting.

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Shipping in Fulcrum draws in a lot of different types of data and is constantly updating from Sales to the Warehouse. To help your workflows move even faster, we’ve made a series of improvements to the processing and display of shipping records. Specific results will depend on how you use the system, but in our testing with live customer data we’ve seen speed increase by up to 90%.

Now you can see placeholders on your schedule where there is upcoming downtime. For details on downtime, simply click on the card and you’ll see the timing and work center details. When multiple downtimes overlap, the schedule will show the full duration from the earliest start time to the latest end time. Click the card when there’s overlapping downtimes to see the details broken out for each time slot individually.

We’ve updated the level of detail for alerts shown in pending schedules to indicate when a schedule has issues, unscheduled changes, or is ready to be scheduled. These updates will allow users to more easily see in advance what is preventing a job from being scheduled.

For users with job edit permissions, you can now click on the priority or due date fields of a job operation card and edit those properties of the associated job. Note this applies to jobs that are not associated with work orders.

We’ve added a couple of features to the BOM editor to make quoting and updating buy item prices more convenient for our customers: When you click on the cost number for buy items in a BOM, the cost breakdown modal pops up and will now also show a vendor grid for that buy item. From this grid, you can edit vendor pricing or add new vendors and immediately see the cost of the buy item updated on the BOM! That means you no longer need to hop between the Item page for that buy item, update vendor information, go back to the Quote or Sales Order BOM and re-add the item to get the updated cost.There is a new 'Refresh Costs'  button added to the BOM to allow user to refresh the costs in the BOM in case a vendor price or other cost has changed outside the BOM since the BOM was created.

If you set up a custom field with the same type and name on an Item, Quote Part Line Item, and Sales Order Line Item, the value set for the custom field on the item page will now be carried over to the Quote or SO anytime this item is added to those documents.

• The mappings today include the following, with more to follow:
• Item -> Quote Line Item
• Item -> SO Line Item
• Quote -> SO
• Quote Line Item -> SO Line Item
• SO Line Item -> Job

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We’ve made some improvements to the Equipment Utilization Report to give you more options to customize how you view the report.

Updates include:

• Display Filter: Group information by day, week, month, or year.
• Date Range Filter: Select specific time periods.
• Department Filter: Tailor your view by departments.
• Sorting: Sort by utilization or equipment name.
• Downloadable Reports: Download reports with selected filters intact.
• New KPI: Track Average Equipment Utilization (current year to date)

It can be difficult to navigate to the right menu option on the Fulcrum page without having the menu itself close. So, we’ve introduced a new keyboard shortcut: ⌘U or Ctrl+U ⌘. or Ctrl+. (that's a period after the modifier). This shortcut will open the navigation bar and keep it open until the user closes it using the same command.

A few notes about this feature: This shortcut is not preserved between sessions and is closed when crossing the Blazor/Angular divide. Additionally, it behaves exactly like the current menu in that it will cover up some material. We will continue working to improve this functionality over time.

The Item Summary tab on the Job Cost report has been repurposed. Previously, it showed the sum of all job values related to that item, which was not a frequently used metric. We’ve updated the system so that it now shows the average unit cost information for each item instead.

This helps you understand, in the time frame selected, what you are estimating it will cost to make an item vs what it is actually costing you, and what is driving that variance (which could be labor, material, outside processing, machine costs, etc). The default summary shows the item rollup and the job breakout so that you can see if any particular job is skewing the data.