Product Updates

We don’t have a ton of performance updates this week, but that’s because we’ve been heads down on getting off of our old infrastructure and completely onto SQL. This means we can finally optimize the application for this new data structure, which is exciting.  A nice first step here is rewriting the sales order grid.

In an effort to improve data consistency, we've refactored the sales order grid so that all data, including shipping and invoicing statuses, are calculated on demand from primary data sources.  Previously, we maintained a "cache" for faster lookups, and despite the effort we would expend to try and keep it updated, it would still occasionally go out of sync with the source records.  This is no longer necessary in SQL-world, so in addition to the consistency improvement, we will also be able to drop all of the background updates that were responsible for trying to keep this “cache” up to date – meaning more horsepower for running the app.

More to come!

To minimize human error when your customers receive your products, Fulcrum has added barcodes on packlists.  To enable it, head to Business Setup > PDFs & Email > Show Barcode setting > set to true. Then, enable it for any of your customers that want barcodes.  The customer-specific setting helps avoid a sudden change in communication and formatting with your customers.

With that on, the following fields will get converted into a 1D barcode:

• Customer PO Number (if filled in)
• Sales Order Number
• Item Name
• Quantity Shipped

Here’s a video overview of the setup and how it looks on the PDF.

Some accountants need to know their WIP at the end of the month for reporting purposes. However, if they missed downloading the WIP report on time, there was no way to retrieve that data retroactively. The new month-end WIP snapshots solve this problem - providing consistent, reliable historical data and freeing accountants from time-restricted tasks.  This report is available in Accounting > Reporting > Work In Progress.

This release includes two notable updates to the Custom Report Builder module:

• Job Activity by Operator - this report provides the quantity completed and daily labor time of each operator, broken down by job, item, and operation. This allows you to see who worked on what for how long, and how many parts an operator completed (both for WIP and finished goods).
• Custom Field Data - over the next couple of days, the majority of datasets will get a custom field column. The formatting will be text data of all the fields, so using a ‘contains’ filter is your best bet.

Raw material was previously shown by total pounds in Purchase Planning, which made it hard to decide what sizes and quantities to buy. Now, you can see nesting details and how many parts each job will produce—giving purchasers clearer info to choose the right sizes.

Fulcrum has been beta testing a pricing option using Shop Rate that is being fully released today.  You’ll see a new “Shop Rate” option in pricing areas of Fulcrum, such as quote line items, sales order line items, and items’ sales tab.  When that option is selected, the price will be calculated as:

( Material Cost * ( 1 + Material Markup ) ) + ( Estimated Times + Operation Shop Rates )

To ensure your operations have the necessary info for the calculations, be sure to fill in values in Business Setup > System Data > Operations > Hourly Shop Rates:

Having good data is so important, especially when it comes to costs and inventory.  While Fulcrum does display warnings for unpicked material, operators are busy humans and sometimes press through the warning without picking.  This can create situations with understated costs or showing inventory as available that was actually used on a job.

To help reduce missed picks, Fulcrum has added a new setting in Business Setup > System Data > Job Settings called “Auto-pick material on job completion”.

When this setting is on, it will auto-pick planned materials when a job is completed from the job tracker or the job's page.  A few points // FAQs:

• If there isn't enough material in inventory, it won't complete the pick
• If there is already a pick against the material, it will skip it under the assumption that it was intentionally under-picked.

Important Note: If your operators can get in the habit of picking, that will always be the best case scenario.  Explicit picking is more accurate and explicit than any automation.  For that reason and as noted above, there are guardrails on this feature and we stuck to safe assumptions.  That being said, if picking is being missed enough in your shop to cause a data problem beyond the occasional touch up, then check this out!

A slightly shorter week due to the holiday, but the team was still hard at work making several performance improvements.  Again, these efforts will compound over time and this is a continued priority for the team.  Here’s what they were able to accomplish this week:

• Public API Performance Improvements - even if you’re not directly using the public API, Fulcrum’s integrations get and update data through the API.  So updates here impacts anyone with the integration.  And if you are using the API, then you’ll see even more benefits.  These changes reduce the load across the system by more efficiently transacting the data.
• Job Creation and Editing - routings can contain a lot of data, by making improvements here job creation and editing will also be improved.
• Inventory Planning - recalculating material availability, purchasing demand, and production demand happens all the time behind the scenes.  Optimizing this makes more room for the rest of the app to be faster.
• Loading Operations for Job Tracking
• Finding Jobs Associated with a Sales Order

More to come!

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To help schedulers and production managers understand their schedule capacity, there’s an existing report in Scheduling > Backlog.  However, whenever we saw teams using this report we noticed a couple of things - they wanted to see further out, and they wanted to know what was included in that time.  Now you can do both!  Select up to 8 weeks out from the ‘Weeks to Show’ dropdown, and click ‘View Operations’ on a piece of equipment to see what’s scheduled.  As a bonus, click on the bars to see just the operations scheduled or overlapping that day.  Here’s a video overview of the updates.

The reporting tool in Reporting > Report Builder already had datasets for total job costs with estimates vs actuals.  However, to provide deeper visibility, we added a dataset that includes a breakdown of estimates and actuals for setup, labor, machine, material, and outside processing by each item and operation on a job.  You can aggregate, slice, and dice this in Report Builder to create a variety of reports.

You know that feeling when you look in the mirror after a fresh haircut?  Well, our designers just gave a fresh cut to the Month-End Reporting page in Account > Reporting.

You can now use {{po_pdf_custom_title}} in your Purchase Order email template. This builds on last week’s release and brings further flexibility to Purchase Order email customization.  To set this up, head to Business Setup > System Data > PDFs & Emails and use the {{po_pdf_custom_title}} variable.

This is a continued focus and priority for the team, and these updates will be able to stack on top of each other.  This week we had many specific performance updates. Examples include price breaks, file attachments, API endpoints, job tracking, chat, and more.  More to come!

We want to make sure you can report on anything that helps you keep a pulse on the business.  As this project gets close to the finish line, the following datasets were added:

• Time Clock
• Scrap
• NCR and CAPA Impacts

You can check these out in Reporting > Report Builder. Remaining datasets coming soon: detailed job cost breakdowns and detailed operator activity.

We’ve frequently heard comments like “Every time I send an invoice to this customer, I need to cc {this person}”.  Now you can!  Customer contacts now have “Include on Emails for” options for Quotes, Sales Orders, Packlists, and Invoices.  Selecting one will mean they’ll be included on every email of that type, for that customer.  You can set that up in the edit contact menu in Sales > Customers > select a customer > select a contact.