What Is a Work Center?
A work center - or production group - is a part of the factory. It can be a single machine or a group of machines, a single workstation or a group of workstations. For example, a "bench drilling machine" or "drilling section".
What Are Work Centers Used for?
You must create work centers before you can create Preparations. During preparations, each operation is linked to a work center. There are two main reasons why each operation is linked to a work center. To calculate costs in a pre-calculation, and to create a loading plan. The criteria used so that a part or section of a factory is turned into an individual work center is therefore that the costs differ but are homogeneous within the work center; or that you want to create a loading plan for that particular portion of the manufacturing process.
What Information Does a Work Center Contain?
The most important information are cost factors. There are 3 cost factors that can be applied optionally, read more about them under Cost Factors. You must have entered cost factors in order to create pre-calculations. You can also enter loading information on a work center. However, it is not required that you enter loading information to be able to view loading plans. Read more about this work center information under Basic Time. You can create links to departments if needed, and enter how manufacturing order documents shall be managed.
You can print work centers using the Work Center List. You can also modify all the information that can be updated on a work center.
On the heading row you enter a new work center or an existing work center that you want to modify.
Under the Costs/Loading tab you enter all cost factors, cost factor exceptions and settings regarding the loading.
Under the Miscellaneous tab you enter settings regarding work cards and the default processing type in the Time Calculation. You can also select the planner for the work center.
Apart from these tabs, you can also activate the tab called Extra info. This tab consists of a number of fields where you can enter optional information. The tab is activated by the setting Show extra info tab in Update Supplier? under the Work center heading under the Manufacturing tab in the Settings procedure.
Things to Keep in Mind when Using the Supplement Called Machine Integration
Each machine included in the machine integration must be linked to a separate work center, that is, one machine = one work center.
Window Functions
Read more about the Window functions under Window Functions in the MONITOR Basics guide.