Setting up Workstations as Machines

Hi,
I’m trying to set up ERPNext for a small sock manufacturing plant with approx. 100+ machines. However I’m having some issues setting up the manufacturing module.

More specifically, I’m having issues with defining the workstations as machines.
When I create a work oder against a sales order I’ve received, the system only allows me to allocate the production to one workstation (machine). However, in my case I am assigning different quantities to different machines for every sales order I get.
In this case would I have to make multiple work orders against one sales order with the expected quantities and assign them to the various workstations (machines)?

I don’t have much experience with ERPNext so any help would be appreciated. Thank you!

Hi Shahjahan,

The Manufacturing Workflow is a fairly complicated and complex process. Most organizations want to retain control over which job to load onto which machines and don’t want to give away that control to the ERP system.

Does an ERP make a single workorder for the entire sales order? Or does it make multiple workorders for each operation? How does it allocate the operation to a workstation, especially when multiple workstations can perform an operation and a workstation can perform multiple operations?

Different organizations have different approaches and standard operating procedures.

I’m curious to know how SAP, Oracle ERP, Infor, Netsuite, Dynamics and the other big guys manage this process. Would people that have familiarity with these packages post here? Or if there is enough traction we can start a separate thread for this discussion.

Shahjahan: Sorry for the diversion, but your best bet is to leave it to the shopfloor the discretion of loading jobs on machines. Use a Job Card for the shopfloor to record this information during the flow of material through various operations and workstations and then finally capture this in a single stock entry and multiple stock entries.

I know it’s not a great answer, but check out Rohit’s initiative here: [Proposal] Manufacturing Roadmap Apr - Jun 2020 and try and influence him to incorporate what you’re looking for.

Hope this helps.

Thanks

Jay

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Hi Shajahan,
Seems to me that you could start with a sales order with a single line of e.g. 5000 units. Then create a material request of type = Manufacturing, and get lines from that sales order. Then on the Mtl Request you split the one line of 5000 units into 100 lines of 50 units each. This can be easily achieved with the Line duplicate function. Once you have such a material request, you click create work order and this will create 100 work orders one for each line of the mtl request.
The operation(s) of this work order will be that of the BOM for the item - one of the 100 machines. Now here comes the interesting part. Once you have submitted these work orders, and created the Job Cards for these work orders, you can edit the job cards easily and change the work centre (machine) of the job card as required.
HTH

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