Does your manufacturing workflow involve creating work orders?  Do you aggregate items from different orders to create a cumulative work order?

We understand how painful it could be to do this manually. That's why we have built the option for you to run a program that does the job automatically for you.  These automated functions that are triggered at specific times by you are called run now rules. Paragon has a growing library of rules at your disposal.  As always - contact us for help setting up rules at support@paragon-erp.com.

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Here we will review how to prepare Paragon for these automated functions, called rules, as well as how to activate and maintain your rules.

The setup

Attributes

Please note that these attribute names can be changed to suit your needs. Just remember that any changes to the attribute names must also be reflected in the rule's script as well.

Automated word order  - On/off attribute.  This attribute determines whether or not a customer's order should be considered in this automation. It means you can decide to have this automation run only for your major customers who are placing large orders.

Material grouping  - free flow number attribute. This attribute acts as a classification tool for products. Depending on how many groups of products you have on a given order, you will have that many different work orders created.

Primary vendor  - custom attribute. This attribute also acts as a classification tool for products. Depending on which vendor makes which products, a work order will be issued specific to that vendor for those products. To setup this attribute, you need to contact Jonar and we will create it for you.

Assigned work orders - Free flow text. This attribute helps us keep track of automatically generated work orders by looking at a given sales order.

Source order - Free flow attribute. This attribute helps us keep track of sales orders by looking at a given work order line item.

Screen setup

Product screen

Material grouping and primary vendor attributes must be added to the product setup screen.

Customer screen

Automated work order attribute must be added to the customer set up screen.

Order screen

Assigned work orders attribute must be added to the order through the set up screen. We put it on the more tab in this example because the summary tab is full.

Work order screen

Source order attribute must be added to the work order through the set up screen. It is an attribute that belongs to a work order line, rather than the work order header because each line could come from a different sales order.

Final verification

Make sure that you have created the appropriate attributes and placed them on the correct setup screens above.

Product:

Make sure the products have the right primary vendor and material grouping. If the primary vendor is all you require to  group your products, you need to set all the products in the same material grouping. If for a given primary vendor, your products should be classified based on another criteria, use a different group name for material grouping.  Don't forget to adjust the rule if the attribute names differ from this sample.

In this example, Roboraptor X has been registered under group 2. And its primary vendor is Motherboard central.

Customer:

Make sure the automated work order is checked as yes for the customers that are to be considered for this rule.

Install and activate the rules

Rules are initially created by Jonar - all you have to do is install and activate them.

This rule is a run now rule. It means it shall only execute when you click on the run now button in the rules screen. You can read more about these rules here.

Make sure that the rule is activated by checking the on checkbox.

Seeing the rule in action

Once you click on the rule, you should see a blue notification. It should indicate the work order number that got created and the sales order numbers that were used.

In this example, work orders 138 and 139 were created. And for that purpose, only the data from sales orders 590, 9 and 129 were used.

Here is work order 138

And work order 139

Here is the sales order 9

And sales order 590

And sales order 129

Now, if you notice, only Roboraptor X and digital scale got included in the work order. The reason being that they have the material grouping and primary vendor attribute configured on them.

What now?

So now that you have installed and activated your rule, you can run it anytime it is needed and you can always deactivate it if you need to.  If you have any other questions about rules - don't hesitate to contact us at support@paragon-erp.com.