Work centers
Where operations run — the stations and machines, their rates, and the processes they perform.
A work center is a location-specific station, machine, or cell where run. It defines scheduling and cost rates and supports one or more processes, such as cutting or welding.
operations are assigned to work centers. The work center's rates price logged labor and machine time, and its calendar constrains scheduling.
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. processes are subcontracted, and suppliers attach to them for outside-processing .
Requiring an ability
Turn on "Requires Ability" on a process and only qualified people can be scheduled for it. What the shop floor does with someone who isn't qualified depends on the setting below. The process has one ability of its own, with the same name; the toggle's description names it. People get it by completing a training that grants it, or a manager adds it on their Abilities page.
While the toggle is on, "If an operator isn't qualified" decides what the shop floor does when someone without the ability opens an operation of this process:
See running an operation without the ability for what the operator sees.
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 separate records in Carbon.
An asset can name the work center it runs on (the asset's "Work Center" field), which is how the work center's "Capital Cost" panel lists the assets behind it with their net book value; straight-line assets also show their monthly depreciation, and disposed assets drop off. Scheduling and depreciation stay independent.
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 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.
Loaded operation
Each work center has a loaded operation: the operation of the latest started there. A Setup, Labor or Machine start loads it. An event that you enter with an end time does not, and neither does an event that starts before the work center's latest load or unload. The operation stays loaded until it is "Done" or "Canceled", is deleted, or moves to another work center. A "Pause" in the MES does not unload it.
Carbon keeps the history of the loads on each work center for at least 7 days after each unload.
The MES work center display shows the loaded operation as "Loaded:" with the job and the operation. When a machine monitoring device is mapped to the work center, Carbon records the machine's run time on the operation that was loaded when the machine ran.