Product Updates

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.

Fulcrum allows you to change the header on your PO PDF based on the status (ex: RFQ or PO).  Previously, downloaded PDFs always used ‘PO’ (e.g., ‘PO1234’). Now, the same rule-based logic applies to the file name.  This helps avoid confusion as to whether the document is a PO or RFQ.

If you already use a custom PDF header, no additional change is needed!  The header logic will automatically apply to the file name so that they’ll be the same.

Note: if you don’t have this set up, and would like to, head to your Business Setup > PDFs & Emails > Purchase Orders and use this as your ‘Custom Title.'

We’ve updated status colors across Scheduling, Jobs, Work Orders, and Job Tracking to make them consistent for both Production Managers and Operators. What changed:

• Job Tracking was using different colors for Pending and Paused — those now match the rest of the app for consistency.
• Scheduled and Approved used to share the same light blue, making it harder to scan some grids. Now:
  
  • Scheduled is dark blue
  • Approved stays light blue

Details:

• Jobs / Work Orders:
  
  • Scheduled = dark blue
  • Needs Review = slightly new purple tint (easier to scan)
• Job Tracking:
  
  • Paused = changed from yellow to grey
  • Pending = changed from grey to purple
  • Chat = changed from purple to blue, matching selected user profiles

This is a continued focus and priority for the team.  This release includes optimizations to:

• Faster Loading for Timers - anywhere timers are used will experience improved performance, such as job tracking, real time personnel/operations, and time management.
• ‘Can Make’ Calculations - for quoting, Fulcrum will calculate how much of an item you can make based on existing quantity (so you know whether you will need to order material or have enough on hand).  However, because the calculation considers demand from other jobs, it can become complex.  This has been improved to run faster.
• Sales Orders and Quotes - the scrolling blue line across the top was from loading a lot of calculated data.  This release improves how loading this data is handled to avoid so much blue bar loading.
  Settings - lots of pages reference settings, so adding some optimizations here yields small performance gains across several pages.

More to come!

We’ve been gathering lots of customer feedback and taking action on it – recent updates have enabled direct correlation between a shipment and an invoice. Expanding on this, the tracking number from the associated shipment will now be visible on the invoice PDF.

The collective efforts of the team are driving progress on performance.  This week, the team focused on the sales order and customer pages.  Specifically:

• ‘Status’ tab on a Sales Order - this page collects a lot of information from across the app, with several opportunities to speed up gathering that data. The impact will be most noticeable for customers with dozens of line items on an order.
• Sales Order Grid - similarly, the KPI graphs at the top are aggregating data across thousands and thousands of orders. Customers with over ten thousand orders will see the biggest gains.
• Customers Grid - a collection of miscellaneous improvements improve the loading times on this page. While the difference may not be readily apparent, this also frees up processing power for the rest of the app.

As part of Fulcrum’s materials database feature, it’s much simpler to create and manage remnants.  To improve that experience, this release adds some enhancements:

1) Previously, you couldn’t reopen an operation that had a remnant created on it.  Now you can!

2) You can now designate a location when adding a remnant to inventory from the job tracker.  If the material the remnant was created from is lot tracked, the remnant will use the same lot number for material traceability.

We are continuing to polish the materials workflow for sheet and plate. A variety of bug fixes have been included in this release. Most notable improvements:

• Ability to edit vendor pricing for material items from the BOM
• More robust job logs for remnant creation
• Reincorporated the active filter on the materials grid

Fulcrum gathers detailed information from every part of your business. The ability to access and report on this data helps teams keep a pulse on performance.  We’ve recently added a custom reporting module and have been steadily adding to the available reports. This release includes the following additional datasets:

• NCRs and CAPAs, including Impacts
• Shipping
• In Process Tracking

Take a look and let us know what you think!

Fulcrum now supports Shop Rate pricing—a new way to calculate prices based on a percentage of material cost, a percentage of outside processing, and an hourly operation rate. You can set a default shop rate on the item page or apply it directly to a quote or sales order line item.

To use Shop Rate pricing, toggle the shop rate switch on the item’s sales page or on a part line item. The price will update automatically as you adjust the material percentage, which is set in the input field adjacent to the price. A detailed breakdown of the price will appear when hovering over the price on the item’s sales page when shop rate is selected.

The operation’s hourly rate and the outside processing percentage are both set on their respective operation's page in System Data.

Strategically, Fulcrum has staffed a group of senior engineers to work on performance and bug fixes.  The impact of this won’t be felt overnight, but the collective efforts of this team over the next few weeks should be significant.  Some notable improvements and fixes from the first week:

• Chat mentions will correctly notify the recipient.
• Rewrite of how the receiving grid loads information.
• Improved start up procedure -  this means any midday maintenance will be mostly unnoticed, and included automated alerts to the performance team to proactively respond to issues.
• Other miscellaneous improvements, with more to come!