ProfitFab 2010 v22.1

Feature Enhancements

• Bilingual Clock Wizard added to shop clock module

This clock wizard will step employees through the clocking process with a series of questions in English or Spanish. The language used for any given employee is determined by a setting on that employee’s record –

When activated, the wizard begins with a common screen where the employee enter or scan their Employee ID.

After entering an ID, the wizard will ask what they intend to do. Depending on previous clock actions, up to three options will be available for them to choose from.

If the employee chooses to clock out for the day (or for lunch), the wizard will clock them out from the Attendance Clock and return to the initial screen, ready for the next employee.

If the employee chooses to clock into a new operation, the wizard will prompt them to enter the operation and station, followed by the job number to be worked on. If they choose to clock a new job into the current station they are working at, then the wizard will prompt them for the job number. After entering this information, the wizard will again return to the initial screen, ready for the next employee.

If an employee is not currently clocked into the Attendance Clock when trying to clock into an operation, the wizard will automatically clock them in to the Attendance Clock. The Bilingual Clock can be used in conjunction with both the Attendance Clock and the normal Shop Clock, or it can be used without them. The time records that will be created will be the same from all three clock options.

The Bilingual Clock will open an additional screen for entering the number of parts done and marking the operation completed. It will not open the screen to manually update material usage amounts on a job, however, it will automatically deduct material usage on jobs if you have set up ProfitFab to automatically allocate the materials.

• Quality / RMA Module

An RMA Module has been added to track returns of customer parts for quality control. Access the Company RMA Table from the Files pull-down menu. This table will list all RMAs in the system, with tabs for Open and Verified RMAs, similar to the Company Quote or Order Tables. RMAs can also be accessed for specific customers from the Customer Activity Center.

The RMA Number generated by ProfitFab is an auto-incrementing number that works similar to the quote, order, invoice, and PO numbers. The Customer Product Return Form can tie the RMA back to a customer invoice and job to track returns for each individual part. Credit invoices can be generated for the parts being returned. On the Description tab of the Customer Product Return Form, you can select the type of nonconformance from a drop-down list of items that you set up in the List Table, accessible from the Setup pull-down menu.

To create a job to rework parts that have been returned, or to build new replacement parts, you need to create a rework order. In the Order Line Form you can indicate that a particular part is a rework part and select the RMA that is associated to the part. When the job is created for that line item, it will be flagged as a rework job. All job time records associated with a rework job will be tagged as Rework time. The invoice created when shipping this job will also be flagged with the RMA number. This will allow for reporting to track statistics on rework jobs.

The Company Job Activity Table has a new tab to allow a quick view rework jobs. This tab will still show all jobs, but all rework jobs will be at the top of the list and display the “hot job” icon.

New reports have been added for quality control, including a report to provide RMA stats. These reports are accessible from the Reports Folder under the Quality tab.

• Increased field sizes for Part #, Product ID, Descriptions, and Drawing # and changed certain field names

The length of the Product ID and Part # fields have been increased to 20 characters each. The Part Revision field remains at 10 characters. The Product and Part Description fields are now 42 characters. The Drawing # field has also been increased to 42 characters and is now available at the job.

These changes have been made on all the screens in the program, however, current users must modify report layouts in the Report Designer in order to update the printed fields. To do this, open the Report Designer, select the layout to modify, click on the field to change then press the Enter key to bring up the Control Properties window. In the Format field, change the size of the string to match the new field size.

Some field names were also changed to show that they contain date information to make setting up the ODBC drivers less complex. These fields will have to be reset in the Report Designer or they will not print in your reports. The fields most affected are the Job Scheduled Ship date and the Job Production Start date fields, but there are several other, less common fields also affected. To reset the fields in the Report Designer, select them as described above and open the Control Properties window. In this case, the Field drop-down will be blank, so drop down the list and reselect the appropriate field.

• Part Definition Lock

Part definitions can be locked and unlocked by users with Supervisor rights to the program. When a part definition is locked, no changes can be made to it, including changes made from a job in the system for that part. If changes need to be made, a supervisor can unlock the part definition, make changes, and then relock the part.

• Lunch periods now accounted for in each employee shift

You can now enter lunch periods for each employee shift. If employees clock in/out during the lunch period, the same rules for the rounding and grace period will apply as they do to the start/end of shift. Automatic entries to the Employee Activity file will only be made if they are outside of the grace period for their shift or for their lunch period. This will help eliminate the many activity records that were being created each time they clocked out during their lunch.

The Data Purge Utility has also been updated to remove the automatic entries created by employees clocking in/out for lunch. If you have hundreds and thousands of unnecessary entries that were automatically created by the system, you can remove them all in one simple step using this feature. When running this part of the Data Purge, only the entries that were created by the system and left unchanged by you will be removed. If you modified the entry in any way, it will not be removed. To remove these entries, run the Data Purge, select Employee Activity and the Automated Entries Only boxes, and enter today’s data in the Retain Records from: to remove all automated entries made prior to today.

• Operation Scheduler changes

The Operation (Whiteboard) Scheduler has been modified to default to showing only one operation for each job. Primarily, this will be the first operation that is ready to work, with operations downstream being hidden until they are ready to work. There are situations that can cause multiple operations to show up at the same time. If an operation has already been clocked into, then that operation will show up in the Operation Scheduler even though the previous operation is not marked complete.

The Operation Scheduler will now only show an operation in Red (Ready, but still awaiting material) if the material is tied to that operation. Before, if an operation was a product usage point, it would show up in red if any material at any operation had not yet been received or marked Pull from Onhand.

• Miscellaneous Enhancements
  • Company Snapshot details, Product Costing Report, MRP Forecast Report, and Quote Win Report (Details) can now be exported to MS Excel.
  • Users can turn off Help tips that pop up to provide more information about certain buttons and fields in the program.
  • Added a default setting for how to charge customers for sheet/structural materials being added to part definitions.
  • Modified the Employee Time Clock table to show newest time clock entries at the top.
  • Increased the Extra Time field on the Detailed Calculators to allow up to 99999 seconds. Previously, the limit was 999 seconds.

• Quality Enhancements
  • PO line items will appear in same order in PO, PO Report, and Receiving table.
  • When drilling down through multiple levels of nested In-House Products the Cost Calculator will not overwrite costs/prices in the higher level parts.
  • Fixed GPF issues associated with Contacts and when printing and emailing some forms at the same time.
  • Changes made to ATTEND file will now show up in the AUDIT file.
  • Fixed problem with DROUTE Operation Replacement where it didn’t recognize a valid entry typed directly into the field and allow it to be replaced, and where cancelling the replacement procedure overwrote the Name and ID of the initial operation.
  • Modified the Station Scheduler to schedule according to the Job Qty instead of the To-Be-Mfgd quantity. Older versions would schedule the full load required for each operation, less already allocated time, for jobs that were partially shipped or had scrap reduce the job quantity.

Fields added to Reports

When updating ProfitFab, fields added to reports are not automatically added to your layouts for those reports. These fields are made available to your layouts but must be added to each report layout, if desired, from within the Report Designer.

New Reports

New reports added:

RMA Form

RMA Stats

The Regular Vendor On Time Shipping Report was added, but it makes use of the report layout for the Service Vendor On Time Shipping report, so there should be no need to import a layout for this report.

After updating, these reports will be available to you, but you will not have any layouts to use. You will need to import and mark the default layouts for these new reports before you can print them.

To import the layout for the new reports, follow this procedure:

From the Report Designer -> Select File > Import Layout

In the “Select file to import from” dialog, enter the filename as RDIMPORT.TPS, or browse through the list of files to find this file. Press Ok button to open the “Import Layouts” dialog.

From “Import Layouts” dialog:

1. Select the desired report to import in the Reports table.
2. Select the Design name and click the Import button to import the layout. You should see numbers flickering on the screen just below the list of reports. These represent the fields being imported. When they go away, the import is complete for that layout.
3. Repeat this procedure for the remaining reports.
4. After the layout(s) has been imported, exit the “Imports Layouts” dialog and go to the FileàOpen Layout and select each report to mark the layout as default.