Product Updates

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.