Walkthrough · 6 min read
Building a Manufacturing Route
Model the real stages your shop floor works through — stations, durations, batch sizing, and unattended dwell time — so scheduling and costing both work off it.
A route is the sequence of stages a product actually goes through on your shop floor — cut, weld, drill, coat, whatever your process looks like. Build it once, attach it to a product's Bill of Materials, and every order for that product schedules and costs itself off the same template.
Open Manufacturing → Workflow Architect
From the sidebar, go to Manufacturing (a Management-role screen). The route builder is the Workflow Architect panel. Give it a Process Routing Name — the only required field — and an optional description.
Custom Manufacturing Router
Design pipelines, route backlog items, configure shifts, and track predictive queues.
Live Factory Floor Progress Monitor
Laser Cut
Laser Cell 1
Target: 55m
OVERDUE
Exp: 08:55 17 Aug
Weld Sub-Frame
Awaiting Available Welding
Target: 90m
QUEUE PENDING
Exp: 10:25 17 Aug
CNC Drill Holes
Awaiting Available CNC
Target: 40m
QUEUE PENDING
Exp: 11:05 17 Aug
Powder Coat
Powder Coat Line
Target: 35m
QUEUE PENDING
Exp: 11:40 17 Aug
Laser Cut
QUEUE PENDING
Weld Sub-Frame
QUEUE PENDING
CNC Drill Holes
QUEUE PENDING
Powder Coat
QUEUE PENDING
Set the batch size
Batch Size defaults to 1 and covers the common case — one unit in, one unit out, durations scale with however many you're making. Change it only when a single production run genuinely produces more than one unit at once.
Add each stage
Under Sequence Stages, click + Add Stage for each step in the process. Every stage needs an activity name and where it happens — a specific station, any station tagged with a given work type (so whichever's free can pick it up), or sent out to a subcontractor entirely. Set how long it takes and whether that duration is per unit (scales with order quantity) or per batch (fixed, regardless of how many units are in the run) — and how many staff it needs, since a two-person lift takes twice the labour cost of a one-person step even at the same duration.
Tip
Got a stage with real dwell time but no labour in it — a multi-day cure, a coating that needs to sit — tick "Unattended (no labour cost)." The duration still occupies the schedule and drives your lead-time estimate correctly, but it's excluded from the labour cost rollup, so a three-day cure doesn't make your quoted cost price look like three days of paid work.
Save, then attach it to a product
Save Workflow Template adds it to your list of existing templates, ready to reuse across as many products as need the same process. A route on its own doesn't do anything yet — it only starts driving real orders once it's picked as the Manufacturing Route on a product's Bill of Materials.
What happens once it's attached
A booked sales order for a product with both an active BOM and a route on it shows up in the Production Queue, ready to launch — copying the route's stages onto a real job card, scaled to the order quantity, which is what your shop floor tablet actually works through step by step. See using a Bill of Materials effectively for how that link works.
Still stuck?
Email hello@manufacturerp.co.uk and a real person will help — not a ticket queue.