Product Updates

As part of our ongoing effort to improve the work order workflow, we introduced a beta with the ability to edit operations for in-progress work orders, with the goal of increasing flexibility in managing work orders to account for human error and real-world production changes.  We’re removing the beta and releasing this fully to all customers!  Here’s a video of the new functionality.

Expected Receive Date was recently added to Outside Processing line items.  This field will now be used for the schedule, with a fallback of the expected receipt date on the PO.

A Promise Date field was recently added for purchase orders and line items.  This field will now be used to calculate the vendor quality score (as opposed to using the expected receive date).  Any historical data was automatically populated to ensure that scores did not get reset during this change.

Fulcrum has a ton of data, and we want to surface that data when and where you need it.  In that vein, this release includes a couple of improvements to viewing job costing.

• Jobs Page - More obvious subcomponent costing dropdown.
• The ‘Associated Jobs’ section on Sales Orders
  • Now displays the estimated / actual costs of the jobs.
  • The progress bars will change color based on the job’s margins (green for under 100%, dark green at 100% and orange when over 100%)

Beta Release: To alleviate confusion in purchasing for raw materials, we've added a size selection interface to Purchasing Planning.

• Grid rows for raw materials will now prompt users to "Select Sizes" rather than directly add to the purchase order.
• The side panel now contains a "Sizes" tab that will display all demand on a raw material based on the estimated bounding boxes on the routings.
• Users select which of the jobs they want to purchase for and Fulcrum will adjust an estimate of how much of any of their stock sizes they need to cover all that demand.
  • Users can override that estimate as needed.
• The rest of the purchase order creation flow remains the same.

Currently looking for new Beta participants! All participants must already be using the materials feature.

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If you have the Autopick Material setting on, any material associated to an operation will automatically be picked once that operation is completed.  This enhancement times the automation of the pick to be closer to when the material would actually have been pulled from inventory, creating a more accurate, real time experience.

Previously, once a make item was completed, you couldn’t reopen any associated work order operations.

This update introduces two new capabilities:

1. Reopen work order - You cannot reopen operations if the work order itself is completed. You must first reopen the work order to reopen its operations.  Reopening a work order will also reopen any associated jobs that were completed.
2. Reopen work order operation after completing an item - The behavior is the same as reopening normal job operations. Reopening an operation for the completed item will revert the associated inventory receive transactions and the operation status will set to In-Progress again.

Previously, if you had already added units to inventory, then closed the job with 0 additional units, this could result in job costs not matching the value added to inventory. This mismatch occurred for two main reasons:

• Reserved Value for Final Units - When fewer units were added to inventory than planned, the system “reserved” part of the remaining cost for the final unit(s). If the item was later closed without adding more units, that reserved value had nowhere to go.
• Post-Add Cost Changes - Since the item was still open, other value-affecting actions could occur after units were added—such as timers running, additional picks, or other adjustments—creating further discrepancies. This scenario created inconsistencies in cost recognition, even when no more units were physically added.
  

What’s Changed:

Now, when a job is closed with 0 units added in the final step, the system retroactively updates the value of all previous inventory adds. The updated value is based on:

      Total Item Cost ÷ Total Quantity Created

This ensures that inventory values match actual job costs.

Fulcrum tracks inventory transactions with their associated cost/accounting/financial values.  However, there are cases when these can get updated.  For example, adjusting the billed subtotal on a PO after receiving, or if job costs get recalculated.  This report will show the original and updates values and dates, and is available on the Accounting > Reporting page.  It’s designed to provide clear visibility into these modifications, helping ensure that accounting records can be updated accurately when needed.

Beta release: Previously, material items added to BOMs operated at a fixed quantity. With this update, material items will now scale based with the parent quantity and the bounding box indicated in the "Estimating" tab.  Here’s a video overview!

As mentioned last week, the Item page got a much-needed makeover.  However, we received some feedback on some important follow ups and added those this week!  Specifically:

• Fixed the search for inputs / dropdowns
• Removed the scroll from the summary panel
• Added deeper recognition of user permissions
• Added back the inventory transaction note to the tooltip on the transactions grid

Better Error Messaging / Blocking

On the work order side, we were not blocking the work order from being scheduled even when there were critical issues with the uploaded nest. This led to confusion on the job tracking side when backend errors would prevent the UI from loading correctly. We'll now block scheduling a nested work order when there are errors in the nest that must be fixed in order to have a happy time in job tracking. Additionally, the errors list now shows a red background on the critical errors (anything in yellow is more of a warning and won't impact job tracking).

Item Tag Filtering on Nest Planning

When cutting, just because something is the same material as another does not always mean they can be cut together. One item might need a better cut quality than another, which means the CNC program will need to use different speeds. To surface this information, some customers are using item tags to show cutting specs. We now surface the item tags in the Nest Planning job/op selector so that the nester can have this information when selecting which jobs to group together.

Line items don't always ship together, but outside processing line items didn't previously have a way of having distinct expected receipt dates.  Now they do!  Note: this is releasing in stages - this week adds the ability to track this data, and next week will factor it into the schedule.

Purchase Orders, PO Part Line Items, and Outside Processing Line items will now track a ‘Promise Date’.  This way, you can track the expected receipt date for scheduling purposes, while using the Promise Date for quality purposes.  A few quick notes:

• Any existing expected receipt dates will be carried over to the promise dates
• As of the next release, this field will be used for vendor scores (as opposed to expected receipt dates)
• To save time, filling in an expected receipt date will automatically fill in the promise date (if it’s empty)

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The prepend and append fields from custom field settings will now appear on PDFs.