Core Concepts

ERPX records more than the raw materials used and the finished item produced. It also keeps the original plan, the material sent to the floor, the person who completed each operation, and the quantity booked into finished stock.

Because of this, several screens contain quantity fields with similar names. They refer to different points in the production process. This page explains where each one is used.

The main records

These are the records used in day-to-day production. The other screens mainly cover setup and reporting.

Record	Answers	Lives for
Production Plan	What demand should be made or purchased together	One planning cycle
BOM	What the item requires: materials, quantities, and operations. It can cover one item or act as a template for all its variants	A reusable master record
Work Order	What item and quantity the factory has been asked to produce	One production run
Job Card	One operation, on one workstation, by one person	One operation within that run
Workstation	Where the work happens and what an hour of that resource costs	A reusable master record
Manufacturing Entry	This much stock actually moved	One posting

When you create a work order, ERPX copies the current BOM into it. If the BOM is changed later, the existing work order is left alone. It keeps the materials, operations, and costs that applied when the run was created.

This preserves production history. If a later BOM correction changed old work orders, previously reported material usage and production costs would also change.

A BOM can be a template

An ordinary BOM names one concrete item per line. A template (Super) BOM is created for a template item, which is the parent of a group of variants. Its material lines use rules that ERPX resolves for the selected variant.

	Ordinary BOM	Template BOM
Written against	A concrete item	A template item that has variants
Material lines	Fixed items and quantities	Rules: which item, how much, whether at all
Covers	One item	Every variant of that item
Resolved	Never. It is already concrete	At work order creation, against the chosen variant

The same copy-at-creation rule applies. ERPX first resolves the template for the selected variant and then copies the result to the work order. See Template (Super) BOM for the rule types and validation messages.

The four warehouses

Raw material stays in stock while production is in progress. Depending on your setup, it can pass through four warehouses. Material in the work-in-progress (WIP) warehouse is still company stock until production is finished.

Where stock actually sits during a work order

Raw material does not go straight into a finished product. It is transferred out of the source warehouse into the WIP warehouse, where it stays until output is recorded. It is still yours and still valued while it sits there, but it is committed to this work order. Only then does it become finished goods, with anything spoiled along the way peeling off into scrap.

Warehouse	Holds	Set on
Source	Raw material before it is committed to this run	Work order, defaulted from the BOM
WIP	Material issued to the floor but not yet turned into output	Work order, defaulted from the BOM
Finished Goods	Completed, sellable output	Work order, defaulted from the BOM
Scrap	Material written off as process loss	Work order, optional

There are two main stock movements. Each one creates a stock entry that can be opened, audited, or unapproved:

Transfer Materials moves stock from Source to WIP. Nothing is consumed yet. You are staging material for the run.
Finish Production moves stock from WIP to Finished Goods. This is the point at which material is consumed and product exists.

Source and WIP cannot be the same warehouse on a transfer. A line whose source is the WIP warehouse is already where manufacturing consumes from, so there is nothing to move. ERPX rejects the line and reports that the item is already in WIP and needs no transfer. Finish Production consumes that material directly from physical WIP stock.

Because of that rule, transferred quantity only ever counts stock that actually moved. If a line shows a transfer, the source warehouse level went down by that amount.

Skipping the transfer

Two settings shorten the process when separate material staging is unnecessary:

Setting	Effect
Skip Transfer	Material is consumed directly from the source warehouse at finish time. WIP is bypassed entirely
Skip Transfer For Operations	Job cards may be completed without their material having been transferred first. On by default

Skip Transfer is useful for short runs where material staging is not tracked separately. Do not use it if supervisors need to see how much material has been issued to the floor during a run.

Material and output quantities

A work order tracks materials and finished output separately. The BOM connects the two, but the quantities serve different purposes and do not always match.

A work order keeps two separate ledgers

The material ledger lives on each work order line; the output ledger lives on the work order header. They are related by the BOM but they are never reconciled against each other, so a work order can be short on material and still show output, or hold material it never consumed. Read both before deciding a work order is finished. The tolerance band is the only rule that gates completion: 248 against a target of 250 falls inside ±2%, so Complete is allowed.

Material side. These fields live on each work order line:

Field	Means
Required Qty	BOM quantity × run quantity. What the run should take
Transferred Qty	How much has actually been moved to WIP so far
Consumed Qty	How much has been booked against recorded output
Returned Qty	Transferred but unused material sent back
Available Qty At Source / At WIP	Live stock, recalculated for the availability check

Output side. These live on the work order header:

Field	Means
Qty	How many you set out to make
Produced Qty	How many have been received into finished goods
Process Loss Qty	Units started but lost. Booked to scrap, not to output
Material Transferred For Manufacturing	Run-level count of staged material

Transferred is not consumed. Material sitting in WIP still belongs to the work order and still carries its value. It becomes consumed only when a finish entry uses it. A cancelled or stopped run may therefore leave stock in WIP. Use the Raw Material Requirement Report to identify these quantities.

Tolerance and overproduction

A production run may finish slightly above or below its target. Two separate settings control the quantities ERPX accepts.

Setting	Governs	Typical use
Tolerance Percentage	How far under or over the target the run may land and still be completable. Capped at 15%	Natural process variation
Allow Overproduction + Overproduction Percentage	Whether output may be booked above the target at all	Deliberate overruns on long runs

Maintain Raw Material Ratio decides how tolerance interacts with material:

On. The material requirement scales with the tolerance. Producing 255 against a target of 250 expects proportionally more material.
Off. The same issued material is expected to yield anywhere inside the tolerance band. This is the usual setting for cutting and forming, where yield varies but input does not.

Sub-assemblies and BOM explosion

A BOM line pointing at another BOM is a sub-assembly. It is not flattened into its components. It marks a boundary between levels.

Exploding a BOM into a work order requirement

Multiplying the recipe by the run quantity is the easy half. The half that catches people out is Fabric Panel: because it carries its own BOM it is a level boundary, not a line to requisition. Tick Use Multi-Level BOM and ERPX raises a child work order to make it; leave it off and you must have it already in stock.

Setting	Effect
Use Multi-Level BOM off	Sub-assemblies must already exist in stock. They are requisitioned like any other material
Use Multi-Level BOM on	ERPX creates a child work order for each sub-assembly, linked to the parent by `Parent Work Order` and identified by its `BOM Level`

Child work orders are ordinary work orders. They have their own job cards, their own transfers, and their own finish entries, and the parent cannot finish until its children have delivered the sub-assemblies it needs.

ERPX refuses to explode a BOM that contains a circular reference, such as a panel whose BOM contains a shirt whose BOM contains that panel. The explosion stops and reports the cycle instead of looping.

Sub-assemblies can themselves be template BOMs. Each level then resolves against the variant being made at that level, and the whole chain is validated up front rather than one level at a time. That is why a gap in a nested rule shows up on the preview instead of halfway through creating the tree.

How production cost is built

ERPX builds operating cost from workstation rates and operation time. It stores both planned and actual values so you can compare them later.

A Workstation Type holds four cost components and combines them into one Hour Rate. Operations and BOMs use the type to estimate cost before a specific machine is assigned. Job cards record the actual Workstation, so reports can compare the estimate with the cost of the resource used.

Cost field	Where it comes from
Planned Operating Cost	Operation time × the workstation type’s hour rate, at work order creation
Actual Operating Cost	Job card time logs × the hour rate of the workstation actually used
Actual Hour Rate	Weighted average across the workstations that did the work

Two switches change the arithmetic:

Fixed Cycle. Cost is charged per cycle rather than per unit. A furnace costs the same whether it is a third full or full.
Use Actual Rate. Final costing uses the measured cost instead of the planned one. Leave it off if you want stable standard costing.

Links to the rest of ERPX

Manufacturing does not post directly to the general ledger. The financial entry comes through the stock ledger, in the same way as other stock movements.

Bill of Materials: building the recipe
Production Plan: bringing demand together
Capacity Planning: checking the dates against available hours
Work Orders: running production
Job Cards: the shop floor
Subcontracting: outsourced operations
Reports: reading the results