Control Screen and Tracking Stages

This article will explain how items move through the Control Screen production.

The 4 major elements to Control Screen Movement are:

Fulfilment Stations

Statuses

Stages

Routes

Fulfilment Stations

These are essentially the highest level of production tracking. We use these as a major separator to help you find your items in production more easily. The most common Fulfilment Stations are:

Production

Distribution

Archive

You may also have other Stations setup if you have multiple production lines or even overseas manufacturing setup that you wish to keep separate.

By default the Control Screen will show the items that are in the Production Station.

You can choose to send products in your Cavewire store to a particular Fulfilment Station by opening the product, selecting the Cavewire tab and updating the Cave Station field to reflect the ID number of the required Fulfilment Station.

Items will initially enter the Control Screen in Production. Once production complete, they will move to Dispatch in the Distribution Station. Once dispatched, canceled or marked as missing, items will move into the Archive Station.

Statuses

Statuses are the actions that you can select in order to move your items through production. Normally an item will only have one status available to select while in production.

For example, if an order is placed to be manufactured in your system, the first Status that may be available to select would be either 'Start Production' or 'Print Job Card' depending on your system setup.

You may also have multiple statuses. An example of this will be when an item is in dispatch. If the item has been made for your Stock account (internal purchase order) you may need to select 'In Stock Room' once the item gets to Dispatch. However, if the item is for an account or customer, the item will show 'Dispatch Now'.

In this case, the 'In Stock Room' status will have a Customer Email Override setting that will cause it only to show when the item has been ordered/allocated by that stock account.

For more information on how to customise statuses, view our How to add a Tracking Status article.

Stages

Tracking Stages are used to show where an item is at that moment in time in your production system. eg. Items ready to be dispatched will be in Dispatch tracking stage whereas items that are in your Stock Room will be in the Stock Room tracking stage.

The control screen gives you the option to filter by Tracking Stage, allowing you to see all items in production currently in that stage.

NB. Make sure if your stage is in a Station other than Production, you may need to also adjust your filters to find results in that stage as the screen shows the Production station by default.

Routes

Routes are used to move items through your Production/Control Screen. The tracking route holds information regarding what Status (action) you can select when an item is in a particular Stage.

Routes can also be setup to initiate a desired action. Eg. Print Job Card may be used to both generate a job card for use during manufacturing and also to move an item into the next stage of manufacturing.

You can slo limit the access of routes to particular Users or Roles. If you only want certain roles or users to dispatch items, you can set this by editing the Dispatch Route.

For more information on users and roles, check out our Users Section here.

Two Routes can also be setup on the same Tracking Stage if you need to include different options in your production line flow.