Work Centers
The capacity and cost master for every production resource — machines, cells, and manual assembly stations — with per-station sequencing, shift definitions, hourly cost rates, and status tracking. Work Centers is the foundation that Routings, Bills of Materials, and Work Orders schedule against.
Overview
A Work Center represents a physical or logical production resource — a CNC cell, an assembly line, a paint booth, a packing station — that consumes time and cost to turn raw materials into finished goods. Every work order in Manufacturing Execution is ultimately scheduled against one or more work centers, and every Bill of Materials operation implicitly assumes the work center it will run on has the capacity, stations, and shift coverage to execute it.
Work Centers sits in the Plant & Process Setup group alongside Bill of Materials, Manufactured Products, and Work Instructions — these four screens define the master data that Manufacturing Execution (Work Orders, Production Scheduling, Shop Floor Monitor, OEE Dashboard, Production Counters) runs against day to day.
Stations
Each work center can hold an ordered list of stations (individual machines or manual steps), each with its own machine code and hourly capacity — drag to reorder the sequence they run in.
Shifts
Define one or more named shifts per work center — start/end time and days of week — so downstream scheduling knows exactly when the resource is staffed and available.
Capacity & Cost
A top-level capacity-per-hour figure plus an hourly cost rate and cost center, used for both scheduling throughput and cost roll-ups on work orders.
Status
Active, Inactive, or Maintenance — Inactive and Maintenance work centers are visually flagged so planners don't accidentally schedule against a resource that's down.
AI Assistant
A slide-out chat panel scoped to capacity, cost, and configuration analysis across the current work center list — see the AI Assistant section below.
CSV Export
Export the filtered work center list — name, code, status, capacity, cost center, hourly rate, station count, and shift count — as a UTF-8 CSV file.
Work Center Fields
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Name | Human-readable identifier, e.g. "CNC Cell 3" or "Final Assembly Line A". Required. |
| Code | Short internal reference code, used in reports and cost roll-ups. |
| Status | Active — schedulable. Inactive — hidden from scheduling but retained for history. Maintenance — temporarily down, flagged with a wrench icon. |
| Location | Free-text physical location — building, floor, or line number. |
| Cost Center | Accounting cost center the work center's labor and overhead post against. |
| Hourly Rate | Fully-loaded cost per hour used to roll work center time into work order cost. |
| Capacity / Hour | Top-level throughput figure for the work center as a whole — used by Production Scheduling for capacity checks. |
| Notes | Optional free-text notes — calibration reminders, known quirks, escalation contacts. |
Stations
Stations model the individual steps or machines inside a work center. Each station has:
- Name — e.g. "Weld Station 1" or "Vision Inspection".
- Machine Code — the equipment identifier, useful for cross-referencing maintenance records.
- Capacity per Hour — the station's own throughput, which may differ from (and constrain) the work center's overall capacity.
- Sequence — the order stations run in. Drag the grip handle on any station row to reorder; sequence numbers renumber automatically.
Why sequence stations at all?
A work center's stated capacity-per-hour is only as good as its slowest station. Ordering stations correctly — and reviewing their individual capacity figures — is how planners spot the real bottleneck inside a multi-step work center rather than relying on a single aggregate number.
Shifts
Every work center needs at least one shift — the form blocks saving with zero shifts, since a work center with no defined coverage cannot be scheduled against reliably. Each shift has a name, a start and end time, and a set of days of the week it runs on (toggle Sun–Sat individually).
Multiple shifts are common for round-the-clock operations — e.g. "Day Shift" 08:00–16:00 Mon–Fri plus "Weekend Shift" 08:00–20:00 Sat–Sun on the same work center.
Creating and Editing a Work Center
Click any row's chevron to expand an inline detail view showing the full station list (sorted by sequence) and shift list without leaving the table. Click the pencil icon to edit, or the trash icon and confirm with Yes to delete — deletion requires a two-step inline confirmation and cannot be undone.
New Record Mode (Settings → Appearance) controls whether Create Work Center opens as a centred modal or a right-side slide-in panel; editing an existing work center always opens as a modal regardless of this setting.
Filtering, Search & Views
Use the search box to match on name or code. Filter pills narrow the list to All, Active, Inactive, or Maintenance work centers. The Refresh button re-fetches the list from the server, useful after another user makes a change.
The Row Layout setting (Settings → Appearance → Workspace) switches between a dense table view and a card view — both show the same fields and support the same inline expand-to-detail interaction.
How Work Centers Connects to Other Screens
| Screen | Relationship |
|---|---|
| Bill of Materials | BOM operations reference the work center(s) that will perform them, so accurate capacity and shift data here directly affects BOM-driven cost and lead-time estimates. |
| Manufactured Products | A product's routing typically names one or more work centers as the resources its BOM operations run on. |
| Production Scheduling | Schedules work orders against work center capacity and shift windows — an Inactive or Maintenance work center is excluded from available scheduling slots. |
| Shop Floor Monitor | Displays real-time status per work center as operators log production and downtime against it. |
| OEE Dashboard | Availability, Performance, and Quality metrics are computed and can be filtered per work center / line. |
AI Assistant
Click the vertical AI Assistant tab on the right edge of the screen (or the Sparkles toggle) to open a chat panel scoped to the current work center list. It analyzes name, code, status, capacity per hour, cost center, hourly rate, station count, and shift count across every work center — not just the ones currently visible in the filtered view.
- Capacity analysis — identifies bottlenecks, and flags low-capacity or effectively unstaffed work centers.
- Cost analysis — breaks down hourly rate and cost center allocation across the work center list.
- Configuration review — flags work centers missing stations or shifts entirely, which represent a zero-capacity scheduling risk even though the record itself looks complete.
- Utilization suggestions — recommends where adding a shift or station would relieve a throughput constraint.
The suggested-prompts panel offers one-click starting questions for bottleneck detection, cost breakdown, missing configuration, and utilization. The panel respects the Writer Engine selected in Settings → Agentic (Local CLI, Hosted API, Local LLM, or Ollama) — Ollama and other local/in-browser engines run entirely on your own machine and never proxy through the server.
Settings & Customisation
| Setting | Location | Effect on Work Centers |
|---|---|---|
| Screen Style | Settings → Appearance | Workstation (dark glass) or Enterprise (white card) for the list, form modal, and slide-in panel. |
| Add Record Mode | Settings → Appearance | "Modal" (default) shows Create Work Center as a centred overlay. "Panel" shows it as a right-side slide-in. Edit always opens as a modal. |
| Row Layout | Settings → Appearance → Workspace | Switches the main list between table rows and stacked cards. |
| Language | Settings → General | Switches all labels, status badges, form fields, and CSV headers between English and Turkish. |
| Enable Manufacturing Mode | Settings → App Modes | Adds Work Centers (and the other Plant & Process Setup / Manufacturing Execution screens) to the left sidebar. |