Plan and produce

Plan and produce is the heart of Bulk: the path a piece of work takes from the moment it becomes a production order to the moment it is finished on the shop floor. Bulk is a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) — the shared workspace where your team runs day-to-day manufacturing — and this section joins the individual tasks of that path into complete, start-to-finish workflows. Read it when you want the whole picture of how work moves through your plant, then follow a linked workflow for the stage you care about.

This is an overview. It explains what each stage does and where it lives in Bulk, and links to a focused guide for each end-to-end workflow rather than repeating every step here.

What "plan and produce" covers

Most work in a plant follows the same arc, and Bulk mirrors it:

1. Work arrives and becomes an order. A customer request — or an internal one — becomes a production order: the record that says what needs making, for whom, and in what quantity. An order can be raised directly, or reserved from an inbound document (the paperwork a customer sends in) and promoted into production.
2. The order is broken into jobs and planned. Each order is delivered through one or more jobs — the unit of work that actually runs on the floor. A job carries a routing: the ordered list of steps, and the machines or stations each step runs on. Jobs can be scheduled onto a planning board so you can see capacity and sequence before work starts.
3. Operators produce the work at a workstation. A workstation is the focused, shop-floor view an operator uses at a specific machine or bay (Bulk also calls these assets). The operator picks their workstation, Bulk shows the queued jobs for it, and the operator chooses what to load. They then work through each routing step — running safety pre-use checks, recording output, and completing phases as they go.
4. Materials are consumed and tracked. As jobs run, the consumables they use are recorded against them, so stock stays accurate and you can see what a job actually cost in materials.

The three workflows in this section each walk one slice of that arc from beginning to end.

Where this work happens in Bulk

Four areas of the navigation carry the plan-and-produce arc. What you see depends on your access, so some of these may not appear for every user.

• Production (in the Modules group) holds the office-side records:
  • Orders — the Production Orders list, where you manage and track customer production orders across their lifecycle (Reserved, New, Open, In Progress, Completed).
  • Jobs — the Production Jobs list, where jobs move from Draft through Open to Completed.
  • Transactions — a Beta view of the individual items and steps within jobs.
• Workstations (in the Platform group, at the top of the sidebar) is the shop-floor entry point. It opens the Select your asset screen, where an operator picks the workstation they will run.
• Scheduling → Planning (a Beta planning board) is where jobs are placed into time windows so you can plan sequence and capacity.
• Inventory is where the consumables and stock consumed during production are set up and tracked.

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Follow a complete workflow

Each guide below strings the individual tasks of one stage into a single, end-to-end workflow. Start with the one that matches what you are trying to do.

• Turn customer work into production — take an incoming customer request from an inbound document, promote it into a production order, and set up the jobs that will deliver it.
• Prepare and run a workstation safely — the operator's path: choose a workstation, clear its safety pre-use check, work through the routing steps, and record output as the job runs.
• Manage materials through production — keep stock accurate by recording the consumables a job uses and watching for replenishment as work draws down inventory.

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Before you begin

What you can do in this section depends on your role and the permissions it grants. A role is the named set of permissions an administrator assigns you; a permission is a single thing you are allowed to do.

• To see and run production, you need production access. The standard Operator role — Bulk's baseline for a shop-floor user — can view and update production orders, create and update jobs, view and plan on the schedule, and view stock. That is enough to work an order through to completion.
• To release and manage orders and jobs at scale, a Manager or administrator role adds the wider controls, such as cancelling orders or jobs.
• Your plant must be set up to produce. The work below assumes an administrator has already created the assets (workstations) your operators run and the consumables your jobs draw on. If a plant has no assets, the Select your asset screen has nothing to show.

A day at Granite Peak Manufacturing

Granite Peak Manufacturing is a UK precision-fabrication company; its Leeds Fabrication Plant cuts and finishes steel parts to order. Here is how a single job moves through the plan-and-produce arc.

1. A repeat customer emails a purchase order for 200 laser-cut brackets. It lands as an inbound document, and Dana Winters, who manages the plant, promotes it into a production order. The order shows as New while its jobs are set up, then Open once it is released for production.
2. Dana opens the order's job and checks its routing — laser cut, deburr, then inspect — confirming each step is pointed at the right machine. Because the order is due at the end of the week, she opens the Scheduling planning board and places the job into a slot on the laser cutter for Wednesday morning.
3. On Wednesday, Sam, a laser operator, opens Workstations, selects the Laser Cutter 1 tile on the Select your asset screen, and clears its safety pre-use check. Bulk loads the bracket job, and Sam works through the routing steps, recording output as each batch comes off the machine.
4. As the job runs, the steel sheet and cutting gas it uses are recorded as consumables, drawing those items down in Inventory so the next replenishment is triggered on time.
5. When the last step is complete, the job — and then the order — closes out as Completed, ready for invoicing.

One order, one job, four areas of Bulk — and a clear trail from the customer's request to finished parts.

Expected result

When you are comfortable with this section you can:

• recognize the arc every piece of work follows — order → job → workstation → materials — and where each stage lives in Bulk;
• open the Production Orders and Production Jobs lists and read an order or job's status at a glance;
• send an operator to the right workstation and understand how queued jobs are shown and then loaded there; and
• follow any of the three end-to-end workflows for the stage you need.

Feature state and what to expect

The core produce flow — Production Orders, Production Jobs, and Workstations — is generally available and is the standard, supported way to run work through a Bulk plant.

Two supporting areas are still maturing and carry a Beta label in the navigation:

• Scheduling → Planning — the planning board works, but its screens and behavior may still change. Treat it as a preview rather than a finished feature, and do not assume it is generally available.
• Production → Transactions — the item-and-step level view of jobs is also Beta.

You can complete the full plan-and-produce arc without the Beta areas; they add planning and granular visibility on top of the core flow.

If something isn't where you expect

• An order or job isn't in the list. Check the status filter on the Production Orders or Production Jobs page — a completed or cancelled record may be filtered out of the default view.
• The Select your asset screen is empty. The plant has no assets you can run, or none are set up yet. An administrator creates the assets (workstations) that appear here.
• A job is stuck in Awaiting approval. That status means the job's routing requires approval and the job is locked until it is approved. A user with the right permission needs to approve the routing before the job can be released to the floor.
• A whole area is missing from your menu. You may not have access to it, or your plant may not use it yet. See Understand access and visible navigation.

Related guidance

• Workflows — every end-to-end workflow, across all of Bulk.
• Turn customer work into production
• Prepare and run a workstation safely
• Manage materials through production
• Review production orders and jobs — the reference detail behind orders and jobs.
• Select a workstation and Load a job — the workstation steps in depth.
• Edit a routing — adjust the steps a job runs through.
• Promote to production — turn an inbound document into an order.
• Plan on the planning board — schedule jobs into time windows (Beta).
• Record production consumption — track the materials a job uses.
• Production reference, Scheduling reference, and Inventory reference — the full module references.
• For operators and For managers — task guides organized by what your job needs.