Work centers
Where operations run — the stations and machines, their rates, and the processes they perform.
A work center is a place on the floor where operations run — a station, a machine, a cell — tied to a location. It carries the rates used to cost and schedule work, and performs one or more processes (the capabilities, like cut or weld).
Why it matters
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
| Field | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Name | text | Unique within its location. |
| Location | reference | The site it belongs to. |
| Labor rate | rate | Cost per labor hour. |
| Machine rate | rate | Cost per machine hour. |
| Overhead rate | rate | Cost per hour of overhead. |
| Default standard factor | enum | How time is expressed (e.g. Minutes/Piece). |
| Required ability | reference | A skill an operator must hold to run it. |
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.
A work center is not a fixed asset. The machine you schedule production on (a work center) and the machine you depreciate (a fixed asset) are independent records in Carbon — there's no link between them, even when they're the same physical machine.
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
Work centers have no fixed capacity field — load is derived from the durations of the operations scheduled onto them. Shifts in Carbon are an employee-and-location concept and aren't bound to work centers. A work center can also be temporarily blocked by an in-progress maintenance task that takes it down.