Creating and Managing Operations

In this article:

What are Operations?

Operations serve as the connection between labour centres and tasks, designed for reporting and capacity planning. Customise operations to fit your organisation's needs. Within each operation, multiple tasks are assigned and completed by staff members. Tasks are organised under your Workflow. When staff members start tracking time against operations/tasks, your job cost reporting will display estimated versus actual time.

Example: You may have an operation called "Machining", and this may have several tasks within the one operation, i.e.: cutting, drilling, edging.

You will want to set up your workflow in operational order so that each task is finished in a logical sequence.

Note: Operation times set in workflows are overridden with times from an accepted quote.

Create Operations

From the User Menu Panel on the left, click Settings > Operations > Create.

Name your operation.
Choose the Item from the drop-down, i.e.: Job, Lead or Project.
Customise how your operation will display on your Target Calendar.
Assign your operation to a Labour Centre.
Set your operation costs, overheads, wastage and profit margins if required.
Click Create.

Tip: Update an operation at any time by clicking into the operation and selecting either Update or Delete.

Please Note: You cannot have two operations with the same name.

Operation Colours

You can customise your Target Calendar display by colour-coding your operations. To do this, follow these steps:

Click into your operation and select Update.
Either use the preset colours, or click the Colour drop-down to customise further.
Save Changes!

Tip: If you choose dark operation colours, you may want to apply white coloured text.

Marking Operations as "Critical"

You can mark operations as "critical", allowing your staff members to see relevant task dates on jobs/leads/projects screens, progress charts and agenda screens.

You can mark operations as critical in Settings > Operations > {Operation} > Update.

Simply tick the checkbox for Critical, then Save Changes:

Once an operation is marked as critical, you'll have the ability to enable that column in the relevant screen, such as the progress chart, target calendar, agenda screens, etc.

Labour Centres

When setting up a labour centre and attaching an operation, this will automatically link itself in the operations set-up. You can add or update these at anytime by opening your operation and clicking Update.

Leave Type

If the operation is classified as staff leave, you can assign the required Leave Type by clicking the drop-down menu:

Operation Costs

Lastly, you can also apply cost, overhead, wastage, and profit margin percentages to operations, which will be used as labour in quotes. If these are left blank, they will default to the overarch pricing found under Settings > Catalogue > Pricing. If you require the operation to have a specific cost, you can override it here.