Work centers

A work center is a place on the floor where operations run, tied to a location: a station, a machine, a cell. It carries the rates used to cost and schedule work, and performs one or more processes (the capabilities, like cut or weld).

Routing operations are scheduled onto work centers, and a work center's rates price the labor and machine time logged against it. It's the link between an operation in the abstract and a real place with a cost and a calendar.

Fields

Processes

A process is a capability a work center can perform; work centers and processes are many-to-many. A process is Inside, Outside, or both. Outside processes are subcontracted, and suppliers attach to them for outside-processing purchase orders.

Rates: estimate vs actual

Rates exist at two layers. When an operation picks a work center, that work center's rates are copied onto the operation as a snapshot. That's what drives the cost estimate. The actual labor and machine cost posted to the ledger reads the work center's live rate at the time the production event was logged. The two can diverge if a rate changes after an operation is planned.

Capacity and operating hours

A work center is a finite resource: the scheduler places one operation on it at a time, inside its real operating hours. Those hours come from a ladder, first rule wins: Always on (lights-out, continuously open) → the work center's own assigned shifts → the location's shifts → a stock Mon–Fri, 8-hour week. Booked time is materialized as capacity reservation rows, which is what the Forecast page draws.

An open maintenance task that takes the work center offline subtracts its downtime from those hours (lights-out machines included), so the scheduler routes work around a machine that's down rather than booking it.

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