Working with M-Box Orders and Jobs in Advanced Projects

M-Box User Support Article (Advanced Users)

What It Is About

Note: This is an article for experienced M-Box users that choose to work with “Advanced Projects”. If you are not (yet) familiar with the functionality of Quick Jobs and Basic Projects, we recommend reading on that first.

To complete a project or sales order you may need to produce several different parts in different quantities. Each part can require a series of production steps, with their own program or work instruction, input material, and tools or fixtures. M-Box helps you organize the complete process with clear scheduling and file maintenance. This article explains how.

Benefits

Flexibility in planning your resources
Insight in the status of the production orders in real time
Simplicity in use and performance

DEFINITIONS

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Customer Order – is a quantity of a product ordered by a customer.

Internal Order – is a quantity of a product that has to be produced to complete Customer Order.

Work Order – An instruction for action (production or tasks) to a department (head) that will be broken down into production jobs (and project user tasks).

Product – the item that is the final output of your production and that will be shipped to the customer.

Part – any item that is worked on in your production. A part can be the final product or the product may consist of different parts.

Job – are created for each time that a part is sent to a machine or workstation for a production step.

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What is "Customer Order"?

Customer Order – is a quantity of a product ordered by a customer.

A project can have several Customer Orders. For example, if the customer orders multiple products or when there are repeat orders.
Every customer order is connected to a project.

What is "Internal Order"?

Internal Order – is a quantity of a product that has to be produced to complete Customer Order.

Internal Order quantity (QTY) can be different from Customer Order QTY if you have some finished products in stock (for ex., from previous orders). By default, the system sets the Customer Order QTY as Internal Order QTY, but it may be changed at any time.

What is a "Work Order"?

Work Order – is an instruction to an Operational Department. The Work Order is handled by the department head and will lead to (production) Jobs and (User tasks).

The system automatically tracks all time spent on Production Jobs and User Tasks connected to a Work Order. This is convenient for billing and cost price analysis.

What is an "Operational Department"?

Operational Department– is a department to which Work Orders can be issued. Typically it is a production department, but other departments can be set to operational if you want to issue Work Orders.

Your company may start with a single Operational Department (for example: “Production”)
However, when you have different departments with their own managers and output responsibility, you follow your department structure.

In case you want to track (for example) efforts spent in Product Development work, you will issue Work Orders to an Operational Department “R&D”.

What is a "Production Job"?

Job – is a piece of production activity (activity unit), needed for parts of a product to pass through certain manufacturing step/stage.

Simply said, every time a batch of (product) parts goes to a machine or workstation, a job is created. Jobs can be scheduled in the scheduling module. If connected to a smart card, the system will recognize the job as soon as the smart card is placed on the M-Box (even when the job was not pre-scheduled).

Why adjust the quantity internal order in addition to a customer order?

You may choose to produce a different quantity from the customer order:

Increase Safety stock
Reduce Consume redundant stock

Each customer order will normally be translated into an internal order. The product of the customer order and internal order are the same. By default, the system generates the internal order automatically in the same quantity as the customer order.

Why create different Work Orders from an Internal Order?

Production orders differ from internal orders when partial productions (sub-assemblies) are completed by different activity units. The finished parts of the production orders can be different from the product of the internal order, only one (final step) needs to be the same.

The (Operational) Departments in your company (each with its own supervisor or manager) will be held accountable for timely delivery on their assignments. The split-up of the Internal Order into different Work Orders lets you keep an overview of the progress of all the parts or process steps of the production.

Why split Work Orders to jobs?

You create a job for every time resource or work station activity. All jobs are scheduled individually, and their status and progress can be monitored in real time.
As you may have intermediate (semi-finished) parts in your factory, the production quantity for each job can be set individually.

Tutorials You May Want to Watch

Available Only for Active Users of Monitor-Box System

Orders >

Create Production Order > Step 1. Create Project
Create Production Order > Step 2. Add products to project
Create Production Order > Step 3. Create activity unit order for Product
Project and Order > Step 1. Create Project and Order
Project and Order > Step 2. Create New Project
Project and Order > Step 3. Add order to project
Make order type inactive
Make product group inactive

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