Product Updates

We’ve added a setting to our scheduler functionality to account for customer-supplied material. Previously, the scheduler had a setting that would only account for purchased material. Now, with both settings enabled, jobs will not be scheduled until customer-supplied materials are received as well. This will be helpful to account for delays and also keep your schedule up-to-date and running efficiently. These settings can be enabled in Business Setup > System Data > Scheduling > Scheduler Settings.

You now have the ability to flag certain items as “build to stock.” This will route job creation for this item to the demand planning section. If your site is configured to automatically generate jobs for every sales order line item, items with this flag will be excluded from that logic. Instead, the job for the stock items will be generated via the demand planning module.

Additionally, if an item is flagged as “build to stock” and is a subcomponent on a new job, the “to make” recommendation of that subcomponent will be set to 0, and a recommendation to make a new stock job will show up within the demand planning module.

This update is particularly useful when making customized subcomponents for an item. Items can now be created as “build to stock,” which will help keep the data our demand planning module needs clean and accurate.

We’ve added a continuous flow process for production. This flow allows items to move through production as they are individually completed, rather than waiting for a full batch to be done. This new feature will allow for items to move more efficiently through your shop, especially in cases where one work center is a bottleneck for downstream processes. The feature can be turned on in business setup.

We’ve added a feature to download reporting data from the Jobs, Sales Order, and Invoice pages. These downloads will provide you with year-to-date overviews in an Excel spreadsheet. The downloads can be found at the top of the pages for Jobs and Sales Order pages, while the Invoice report can be found within the Reporting section of the Accounting module. The downloads will be available to admin users.

To help you see costs more clearly and quote more accurately, we’ve introduced a new method to break out machine, labor, and overhead rates within Fulcrum. Previously, work centers used a blended rate of machine and labor costs, but now users can see more detailed job-costing information by breaking out the labor and machine estimates. This way, you can track machine and labor time separately to ultimately arrive at more accurate job costs for complex jobs or for machines that can run lights out.To take advantage of this new feature, flag work centers and the associated operations that you’d like to track machine time against in your business setup. This will enable machine time estimates on the associated BOM/Routings and tracking of machine time in the job tracker.

We’ve made some key changes to the way Fulcrum recognizes customizations to items on sales orders and quotes that will help shops that use some customized components and some from stock.

Fulcrum now identifies the specific layer of the BOM/routing that was customized, allowing the system to give better “to make” recommendations on the job for the non-customized portions of the job.

The “to make” roll-up on a job looks at all of its subcomponents, existing inventory, and demand across other jobs, and comes up with a recommended quantity of the subcomponent to make.

The system now understands specifically which subcomponent was customized — meaning it cannot be pulled from stock — and which were not customized and could be pulled from stock. This will help streamline your review process and enable the system to give you better recommendations.

When quotes and sales orders are categorized as won or lost, the cost information is now locked at the time the BOM and routing information is locked. Before this update, the costing information would pull the most current pricing information with no historical data. This will give you an accurate, historical view of your quoting and sales order activities.

We’ve added a new function to mark items as single-use when creating a quote and a new indicator on the items page. Before this visual indicator, items would be archived once a sales order was closed without a way to identify that the item had historically been single-use. For our customers that are consistently using single-use items, this creates a cleaner view in the items grid.

Fulcrum users can now update their own company data within Business Setup. This means that you can make any changes to your company data directly through your Fulcrum site, rather than going through your launch or customer success manager.

We’ve added a feature to “Pick All” inventory for a job, as well as a warning when items have not been picked. This will help ensure that no items are missed during the operations and streamline the picking process.

We've made continued improvements to associated purchase orders directly to jobs. The grid now provides you with even more information including POs for outside processing steps and other POs created from the job, PO status, and received status. This will give you a more holistic view of purchasing related to specific jobs, and give more actionable information at a glance.

Fulcrum users can now create fully custom sized labels for items and jobs. Before, users had to select from three available size options, but now you can select any size that makes sense for your business. The free-form sizing can be found and updated in System Data, where you can set default sizing for small, medium, and large label sizes. This allows for more flexibility to fit your shop's specific needs.

We’ve added the option to copy in-process tracking steps to make them easier to duplicate within a job’s routing step, and you can also more easily re-order the steps. This should help create a more efficient flow when editing routing steps.

When using work orders, you can now pick materials related to a job rather than items tied directly to a routing step. In the Job Tracker, when job tracking against a work order, team members will now see the materials associated with the underlying jobs all organized by Job ID. The goal here is to create a more streamlined flow when setting up work orders and to make it easier for operators to efficiently pick the items that they need to complete it.

It can be difficult to accurately track scrap material for shops that have complex jobs with operations running over multiple days or weeks. To help keep track of scrap over these long-run operations, we added the ability to log any scrap for the operation while the job is being worked. This will give you a more accurate and timely view of how much is being scrapped and give you a chance to make any necessary changes.