ProfitFab 2012 v23.3

Announcing the release of ProfitFab 2012. This version features a new Nesting Module along with many other changes to help your life easier.

Feature Enhancements

Job Nesting Module

For shops that use commercial nesting software to maximize yields on 2-D sheet material, ProfitFab’s Nesting Module can be used to improve accuracy on time and material tracking. After running a series of jobs through a nesting program, data from that program can be used to set up a Nested Job in ProfitFab. A nested job can then be clocked in to track time on all jobs from the nest simultaneously, and clocked out to allocate the material required by the nest. Nest jobs can also be set up for lights out operations where many jobs using multiple materials are run through a machine with a sheet loader and lights out capabilities.

Before setting up a nest

Before setting up a nest, there are a couple of things that must be set up in ProfitFab. First, a nested job in ProfitFab is focused on an operation, and so operations must be set up as nestable operations in the system. To set an operation as a nestable operation, check the Nestable box in the Operation Specs of the Default Operations Form.

Second, in order for materials to be considered nestable together, they must be similar in nature. Obviously, you wouldn’t nest a job requiring two different types of material. The fields that are required to be set to find nestable jobs in the system are the product’s Alloy and Gauge/Thickness field from the Properties box in the Product/Service Form.

Setting up a nest

Once you have run your jobs through your nesting software, you are ready to set up a nest job in ProfitFab. To do this, open the Company Job Nest Table by clicking the Nest icon.

Click [Insert] to open the Job Nest Form.

Enter an Operation ID for the operation at which you are going to nest jobs, or click the button to open an Operation Selection Table. Please note that only operations that are checked as Nestable will show up in this table. Select the desired operation from the table to return to the Job Nest Form.

Now, you need to select a material on which the jobs are to be nested. Click the [Insert] button to bring up the Nest Material Table. Enter the Product ID or click the ellipses button to open the Product/Service Table and select a material. Enter the total quantity of this material required for the nest – you should be able to get this value from your nesting software.

Click the [Add Jobs] button to search through active jobs to find jobs to add to the nest. The Nest Job Select Table will search all active jobs looking for any that have the material being nested on, or any similar material as described above, being used at the operation you have chosen. Go through the table adding jobs to the nest by clicking [(Un)Mark Jobs] button to mark them. When you have selected all that are needed, click [Add to Nest] and you will return to the Nest Material Table.

Once all of the jobs have been added, you need to calculate the material needed for each individual job and you do this by clicking the [Calculate Material] button. To calculate the material for each individual job, ProfitFab will look at the part costing size and multiply by the number of parts being manufactured to calculate the total square inches of material needed for the job, and for each subsequent job on the nest, keeping a running sum of the total number of square inches required. Then ProfitFab will prorate the needs of each job as a percentage of the total amount needed, and use this factor to assign a percentage of the total quantity of material required for the nest to each job. After calculating the material needed for each job, click [OK] to return to the Job Nest Form.

The final step needed before verifying the nest is to calculate the time needed for each job. Nesting won’t necessarily save massive amounts of time but the nest job will be clocked in for some amount of time it takes all jobs to complete, and each job is only getting a portion of that time. To find the portion being allotted to each job, click the [Calculate Time] button. ProfitFab will find a prorated time factor much the same was as the material was allocated. This factor will then be used at the shop clock module for each job time record.

If you are going to run a nest with multiple materials, insert another material and add jobs to it following the same steps outlined above.

Once you have completed setting up the nest, and everything is accurate, you can verify the nest and print a nest Route Sheet to give to the employee working on the jobs.

Verifying a Nest

When a nest is verified, ProfitFab will loop through each job on the nest, find the material that is being replaced by the nest on that job, and remove that material from MRP and from the job. Then, the material that is being used on the nest will be added to the job and added to MRP. This is so that clocking into the job allocates the correct material to the job and that MRP reports the correct amount of material that needs to be ordered. The original material attached to the job is not actually deleted, it is just hidden and marked in the background so that it doesn’t show up in tables or on the Job Form. However, if you modify the job part definition and elect to update the master part definition, the original material will remain on the master part definition. It will not be replaced by the material being used in the nest.

Nest Jobs and the Shop Clock Module 

Nest jobs have a special time clock procedure in the Shop Clock Module. This clock must be used when clocking a nest job in or out. The clock screen is similar to the Timeclock Entry Form with the exception of entering a Nest Number instead of a Job Number. There is also no need to enter the operation since that is already known as part of the nest job. When a nest job is clocked in, all of the jobs that are part of that nest will be clocked in by the system. Material will also be allocated to each job based on the material requirements calculate for each job. When the nest job gets clocked out, again, all jobs from the nest will be clocked out.

When a nest is being clocked out, the employee will be asked if the nest is complete. If Yes is selected, the nest will be marked as closed and moved out of the Verified folder on the Company Job Nest Table. If a nest is closed, it cannot be clocked into anymore. If No is selected, the nest is not changed.

Time records for the nest will be stored and accessible on the Job Nest Form. If the time record needs to be modified, it can be accessed from here. Changing the nest time record will open the Nest Time Clock Form. Any changes made to the time record on this form will update each individual time record made for each job on the nest. This is useful in situations when you are running a lights out nest and the nest gets clocked out at 7:00 am but the jobs actually finished during the night when no one was around to clock the nest out.

The Job Time Clock Form for a job on a nest will reflect the full time that the nest was clocked in, but the Net Time will be the actual time allocated to the job when running time related reports or costing reports. The net time is based on the Time Factor times the Total Time of the nest.

Assemblies

In past versions of ProfitFab, assemblies were treated as a manufacturing process, but only main components of assemblies could be placed onto quotes, orders, and invoices, and maintained in inventory. In ProfitFab 2012, any assembly component can be treated as a saleable part and maintained in inventory.

Working with Assemblies

In ProfitFab, you can define a set of parts as an assembly so that they are treated as a group when it comes to quoting or jobs. Assemblies may be complex and contain multiple levels, or they may be simple with only two levels. Assemblies components are referred to as Main Component for the top-most level of the assembly, and Sub-components for all other levels. They are also referred to as Parent Component and Child Component to show the relationship they have to each other.

Creating an Assembly

To build an assembly, first create all the part definitions for the components. Next, from the Customer Activity Center, select the part that is to be the main component and click the button [Convert to Assembly]. You will then see the green Assembly icon shown next to the part number. Click the [Change] button to open the Assembly Map Table. Attach sub-components by clicking the [Attach] button and selecting them from the Customer Parts Table. To add multiple level components, select the parent part and click [Attach] and components will be added to that part of the assembly. Once the sub-component is selected, the Select Operation table will open, showing the operations of the parent part. Select the operation at which the child component is to be attached. ProfitFab will use this operation as a trigger for relieving the child component from inventory when working on the parent component job. If it takes more than 1 sub-component to produce 1 parent component, open the sub-component part definition from within the Assembly Map and enter the quantity required to make the parent component.

During the upgrade process, all existing assembly components will be attached to the very first operation on their parent component. This will ensure that all are attached and that the program will work as intended, but you should analyze your assemblies and make sure that you reattach components to the operation that makes the most sense for it. This process does not need to all be done at once. It can be done over time as you put assemblies onto quotes or orders.

Putting an assembly on an order and creating assembly jobs

You can put any component of an assembly onto an order for a customer. When you do, jobs will be created for that component and all child components needed to create that component. When you verify the order, ProfitFab will detect that an assembly part is on the order and ask if you want to modify the assembly’s component job quantities. By default, ProfitFab will be set up to manufacture as many child components as needed to produce the parent component. There are situations where you might want to produce more child components to build up stock, or you may want to produce less because you have some in stock. In these cases, responding Yes to the question will open the Schedule Assembly Jobs table.

Double-click on a sub-component job to change manufacturing quantities for that job and its sub-components. If you increase the job quantity, then all children components of that job will be increased, and if you decrease it then all children components will be decreased also. If you change the new job quantity to 0, all children component jobs will also be changed to 0 and no jobs will be created for those components.

Working with assembly jobs

Working with assembly jobs is not much different than working with simple part jobs. You still clock in and out, track time and materials to the jobs, and ship them when they are done. However, sub-component jobs do not get put on invoices when they are shipped. Instead, they are shipped directly to stock. When you clock out of a parent component job at the operation where a child component is attached, the child component will be pulled out of inventory. How much gets pulled out depends on a setting on the Time Clock tab of the system setup. The checkbox for prompting users about the completion of an operation controls this. If you have the box checked so that the operation complete screen comes up with the field for the quantity of parts completed during the session, then the quantity entered there will determine how many sub-components get pulled out of inventory. If you do not check the box, then the program will pull out of inventory enough sub-components to satisfy the need for the full parent component job.

Assembly Job Map

Often, shops with assemblies deal with very complex assemblies containing many components. Trying to keep up with all the jobs that are part of an assembly job is not easier by using the Assembly Job Map. You can access this from within the Job Form of the main component job. The Assembly Job Map gives you access to two reports: the Assembly Map report and the Assembly Job Status report. The Assembly Map report shows the assembly structure along with the job number of each component on the assembly. The Assembly Job Status report gives you a brief rundown of the status of the jobs, showing if the job has been completed, how many parts have been completed and how many hours of machine time have been allocated to the jobs.

Other Enhancements

• Improved performance – modified the Attendance clock to speed up performance. Networking issues and screen structure caused the attendance clock to take anywhere from 15-60 seconds per entry, now takes only 2-5 seconds.
• Fewer mouse-clicks – set the part definition form when inserting new parts to only require a double-click of an operation to add the operation’s default time to the part. This will allow you to simply run through the list operations, double-clicking the operations that are needed, then saving the part definition. Once you go back into the part definition, the operations can be modified as usual.
• Fewer mouse-clicks II– modified the MRP table to automatically scroll down to the next record when marking an item to post to a PO.
• More flexibility – added an option for entering an alternate billing address to an order. The billing address from the order is automatically copied to the invoices that are created from the order’s jobs. You need to be careful, however, if you export invoices from ProfitFab to your accounting programs as most accounting programs only allow for a single billing address per customer.
• More options – added additional sorting options on the Operation Scheduler. Also added color coding on the Scheduled Ship Date field in the Operation Scheduler Table. Ship dates shown in Red are already past due. Ship dates shown in Yellow are due within the setting of the ASAP window (for example, an ASAP setting of 14 days will cause all jobs due to ship within the next 2 weeks to show up in Yellow). The ASAP setting is found in the System Information setup.
• More options II- added an Tax Exempt expiration date field for customers who are marked as non-taxable. On the Customer Listing report, you can now filter for customers whose Tax Expiration date is approaching, or for customer last activity or first activity.
• Added a default Sales Rep field to the customer which will be used to set the Sales Rep fields on all quotes, orders, and invoices to that customer.

New Reports

The following new reports have been added to the program, along with other report changes (adding fields available to reports)

Active Job Listing – a simplified version of the Active Job Status Report, shows job status and list of remaining operations

Employee Parts Done – a listing of how many parts were completed at jobs an employee is credited with working on.

Invoice Verified Detail – a detailed listing of invoices that are in the Verified folder that were created during a specified date range. This report gives the same level of detail as the Working and Shipped Detailed reports.

Nest Job Search – this report will search through active jobs looking for potential matches to add to a job nest.

Nest Route Sheet – this report is used as a route sheet for nested jobs and provides the information needed at the Nest Time Clock for clocking the nest in, with and without bar codes.

Purchase Order History – a listing of purchase orders made during a specified date range. This report gives the detail that is used to make the Purchase Order Graph report.

WIP Report – a variation of the existing Work In Process report. The original report is order-based and groups all jobs from an order together whether the jobs are shipped or still active. This WIP report is job-based and only looks at active jobs.

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:

Select the desired report to import in the Reports table.

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.

Repeat this procedure for the remaining reports.

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.

Quality Enhancements

• Fixed problem where Service Vendor On Time Report would not print for the entire list of vendors if vendor names used mixed case (some all UPPER CASE, others using Title Case)
• Fixed problems where working with contacts in various screens caused ProfitFab to GPF
• Fixed problem where adding a new Contact to a new Vendor or new Customer caused the contact information to be lost
• Fixed problem in shop clock product tables that caused inventory usage to not be updated
• Fixed problem when importing quotes into orders and the sequence of the line items was not the same as the sequence from the quote
• Added a routine to ‘self-clean’ the license file for situations where users exit the program because of being locked up but do not free up the license that was being used. When a license is being allocated to an instance of the program that is no longer responding, after 15 minutes that license will be freed up by the system. For shops who only have a single license and that license is locked up, logging in as SUPERVISOR with the password ONE will free up the license so that you can then log back in.