Work Orders

A work order (WO) is the document that authorizes a specific quantity of a product to be manufactured by a specific date, against a specific bill of materials and routing, at a specific warehouse. Every component issue, every operation report, every scrap event, and every finished-good receipt is recorded as a child of a work order — so closing a WO produces a complete cost-and-quantity picture of one production run.

Creating a Work Order

To create a manual WO:

1. Navigate to Manufacturing > Work Orders in the sidebar.
2. Click New.
3. Fill in the header:
   • WO # — Unique identifier (e.g., WO-2026-0500).
   • Product — The parent product being manufactured.
   • Target Quantity — How many units to produce.
   • BOM — The bill of materials to consume from. The default ACTIVE BOM is suggested.
   • Routing — The routing to schedule against. The default ACTIVE routing for the product is suggested.
   • Source Warehouse — Where component issues default to.
   • Destination Warehouse — Where the finished goods will be received. Often the same as source.
   • Destination Location (optional) — Specific bin / aisle inside the destination warehouse where the finished good lands at completion. Leave blank to let put-away use the warehouse default; pick a location when QC, segregation, or lot-tracked finished goods need to land somewhere precise. The dropdown is filtered to locations inside the chosen destination warehouse and clears automatically when you change the warehouse.
   • Due Date — When the parent must be available to satisfy demand.
   • Priority — Lower number = more urgent. Used by the scheduler to break capacity ties.
   • Source — Manual for direct entry. Other sources (Planning run, Customer order, Rework) are populated automatically when the work order comes from those flows.
4. Click Save. The WO is created in Draft status.

The work-orders list is the shop’s worklist. Use the search box to find an order by number, and the filter button beside it to narrow by Status, Source, Product, Priority, Subcontract, Active, a quantity range or a Due / Scheduled Start date range — a planner’s morning view is Status = Released, Due up to the end of the week (Working with lists).

Lifecycle

Work orders progress through nine statuses:

Changing status

The order’s road runs along the bottom of the header: Draft · Pending approval · Approved · Released · In progress · Completed · Closed, the whole journey at a glance. The step the order is on is the one you can click; the next one is a button, so sending an order for approval or releasing it is one click. Steps already behind it are ticked, and hovering one says when it was reached and by whom. A step the order jumped — approving straight from Draft skips Pending approval — is drawn faintly, so the road still reads as the usual way even when this order did not take it.

Click the current step to open the full map. It draws every status, including the ones off the road: On hold, which leaves the two working steps and comes back to them, and Cancelled, which hangs under the step the order left from. Statuses you cannot reach from where the order stands are words rather than buttons.

Hold, Cancel and the reopen off Closed ask for a reason before they run. Everything else the header offers — Schedule, Clear schedule, the subcontract manifest, Report breakdown, Delete — is in the three-dots menu on the right, so the road stays the main affordance. On a narrow screen the road folds back into a single pill with the same map behind it.

Releasing a Work Order

Release is the heavy step. When you click Release on an Approved WO, Beelocity, in one atomic transaction:

1. Explodes the BOM onto material lines (one per active component, plus any by-product lines).
2. Copies the routing onto operation lines.
3. Places reservations against stock_quantities for components that aren’t backflushed or pre-issued. Best-effort — partial reservations are allowed when there’s not enough free stock; the affected lines are marked accordingly.
4. Freezes the standard cost at release on the WO header (BOM-rolled component cost + routing-rolled labor + overhead + subcontract fees). This frozen figure is what actual costs are compared to at Complete to compute variance.

After release, the WO is on the floor. Components can be issued, operations can be reported.

Issuing Components

Two paths consume components:

• Manual issue — The order’s material lines sit beside the details on the Overview; pick a line and click Post issue. Enter the quantity and source warehouse (pre-selected to the WO’s material warehouse). The unit cost defaults to the cost stamped at release from the product’s standard cost — override it only when this consumption has a known different cost. Lines whose Lot Policy is Manual also ask which lot to consume, listing each lot’s available quantity and expiry at the chosen warehouse; FEFO/FIFO lines pick their lot automatically. The system inserts a WORK_ORDER_ISSUE movement, decrements stock, and bumps the WO’s running material cost.
• Scrap return — Post Issue with reason Scrap return puts previously issued quantity back into stock (enter the quantity to return — at most what has been issued) and reverses its cost off the WO.
• Backflush — Components on lines with Issue Method = Backflush are auto-issued when their consuming operation reports completion. The system pro-rates the line’s required quantity by the operation’s completed quantity / target quantity, then posts the issue automatically.

The first issue against a Released WO transitions it to In progress and stamps actual_start_date.

Every grid on the work order narrows on its own filter button (Working with lists): the material lines beside the details by Product, By-product, Issue Method, Lot Policy or a required / reserved / issued quantity range; the Operations tab by Status, Work Center, a Scheduled Start / Scheduled End date range or a quantity range; the Material issues tab by Reason, Backflush, a Posted At date range or a Qty / Unit Cost range. A posted issue shows up on the issues tab straight away.

Reporting Operations

From the Operations tab, click Report on the operation that just ran. Enter:

• Completed quantity — Units that passed this step.
• Scrapped quantity — Units lost at this step (non-recoverable).
• Labor hours — Operator hours spent.
• Mark operation finished — Toggle on when the op is done. Triggers backflush of components on this op and, if this is the final operation, emits a WORK_ORDER_RECEIPT movement to the destination warehouse for the parent at the completed quantity.

Operation reports accumulate, so you can post partial reports as a long run progresses (e.g., 10 units at 11:00, another 15 at 14:00, mark finished at 17:00).

Scrap

Scrap is reported per-operation, not on the WO header. Two paths:

• Operation scrap (a part is scrapped at a step) — Report it via the Scrapped quantity on the Report Operation form. The completed quantity flowing to the next operation is reduced accordingly.
• Component scrap (a raw material is damaged before it is consumed) — Report it as an inventory adjustment on the component, not as a WO scrap. This keeps the WO’s variance attribution honest.

When scrap is recoverable (e.g., aluminum offcuts that go back to scrap stock for resale), model the recovered material as a by-product line on the BOM. The recovered weight then auto-receipts to a “Scrap stock” warehouse on completion.

Holding and Resuming

If production must pause — quality issue, missing component, equipment down — click Hold and enter a reason. The WO transitions to On hold. Reservations stay in place; operations cannot start; no new issues or receipts. When you’re ready, click Resume; the WO returns to Released. If operations were already running, the WO will flip back to In progress the next time an operation reports activity.

Reporting an equipment breakdown

When the machine itself fails mid-run, don’t just hold the WO — use Report breakdown in the work order’s overflow (⋯) menu. Describe what happened, optionally pick the asset (leave on auto-detect and Beelocity finds the machine through the WO’s operations and their work centers), and optionally attach a problem code from the maintenance failure catalog. In one step this:

• puts the production WO On hold with the breakdown as its hold reason,
• opens a breakdown maintenance work order against the machine, already in progress with its downtime clock running,
• flips the asset to In maintenance and tells the production scheduler the work center is down.

The order’s Overview then shows a Linked intervention link to follow the repair. When maintenance finishes, resuming production stays a deliberate human step — click Resume on the production WO once the line is confirmed back up. If several machines share the WO’s work centers, the dialog asks which one broke.

Completing and Closing

When all required output has been received and all expected operations have reported their final completion, click Complete. Beelocity computes the three variance figures by comparing actuals against the standard cost frozen at release:

• Material variance — actual material cost − snapshot material cost (positive = unfavourable, more raw material than planned).
• Labor variance — actual labor cost − snapshot labor cost.
• Overhead variance — actual overhead cost − snapshot overhead cost.

These are stamped on the header. Click Close when ready; closing finalizes the variance figures and work-in-progress (WIP) totals on the work order and seals it read-only.

Reopening a closed work order

Occasionally, data discovered after close needs to land on the original WO — a missed labor entry on an operation, an under-counted final receipt, a scrap event that landed on the wrong step. Reopen is the corrective action for exactly this case; it returns a closed WO to In progress so the fix can be posted, and then the WO is completed and closed again as normal.

To reopen:

1. Open the closed WO’s detail page.
2. Click Reopen at the top.
3. Enter a reason — required, and surfaced in the audit log so the corrective action stays attributable (e.g. “Missed labor hours on op 30 from 2026-05-09 shift”).
4. Confirm.

What Beelocity does on reopen:

• Status returns to In progress so issues, operation reports, and final receipts can be posted again.
• Variance figures on the header are cleared (material, labor, overhead). They’ll be recomputed from the corrected figures when the WO is completed and closed again.
• actual end date is cleared because the WO is no longer finished.
• Reservations are not auto-restored. Most reopens don’t need new issues; if yours does, post the issue manually — the usual free-stock checks apply.

When to reopen vs. when to start a new WO:

• ✅ Fixing a missed report, restating a scrap event, correcting a labor entry — use Reopen.
• ❌ Adding production that was never started inside the WO’s run window — create a new WO. Reopening to artificially inflate a finished run distorts throughput and yield analysis.
• ❌ Mass adjustments across many WOs — if the same error affects dozens of work orders, correct the underlying cost data (BOM costs, labor rates, overhead rates) so future runs are right, rather than reopening each one.

When you re-close a reopened WO, the variance is recomputed from scratch against the standard frozen at release, so the corrected figures replace the originals on the work order.

Cancelling

Cancel a non-terminal WO when the demand evaporates or the run cannot proceed. Click Cancel WO and enter a reason. Beelocity:

1. Reverses all outstanding issues with Cancellation reversal rows (negative quantity, automatically posted).
2. Releases reservations on unconsumed BOM lines back to free stock.
3. Stamps the cancellation reason on the header.

The cancelled WO is sealed and read-only once these reversals complete.

Cost Card

The Cost tab shows three views side-by-side, one row per cost element:

• Snapshot — What we expected (frozen at release).
• Actual — What it actually cost (running totals updated on every issue / op-report).
• Variance — The difference, broken out by material / labor / overhead.

Use this card to spot abnormal runs quickly and investigate before close.

Scheduling

Released work orders are slotted onto work centers by the finite-load scheduler. The per-WO entry point lives on the Operations tab:

• Scheduled Start / Scheduled End — one pair per operation, populated when the scheduler runs.
• Schedule toolbar action — opens the dialog (forward/backward + anchor date) and runs the scheduler on this WO only.
• Clear schedule toolbar action — wipes every segment; in-progress operations keep their actual dates.

The Gantt view that used to live in a per-WO tab now lives on the cross-WO Scheduler page (Manufacturing → Scheduler in the sidebar). Click any segment there to jump back to the originating WO. Operations that are already in progress are preserved across runs. See the Scheduler page for the full picture, including the per-work-center Load chart.

Common Pitfalls

• Trying to release without an approved BOM and routing. Both must be Active for the release to succeed. If either is Draft, activate it first.
• Editing the snapshot. The snapshot is frozen at release for a reason — variances must compare against a stable baseline. Don’t edit it; if the standard cost was wrong, correct the underlying cost master data so future runs are accurate instead.
• Reporting more output than target. Operations cannot complete more than their target quantity. If a run produces excess, create a separate WO for the overflow.
• Forgetting to close completed work orders. A completed-but-not-closed WO leaves its variance unfinalized and WIP figures open. Close work orders promptly so each run’s production figures are complete.
• Cancelling instead of placing on hold. Cancellation reverses everything. If you just need a temporary pause, use Hold; reservations stay in place and you can resume cleanly.