Product Updates

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'.

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 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 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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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’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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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’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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