About Work Orders, Operations, and Serials/Lots

A work order is a request to manufacture a certain quantity of products. It contains information on the model, route, and quantity of a product that must be manufactured. Work orders are either created in Route Editor or imported into Plant Applications using the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) scheduler and import services.

Work orders are grouped by product and are assigned to a specific production line for manufacturing.

A work order comprises the job details and operations. To manufacture each type of product, a sequence of tasks must be performed. Each task or a set of tasks is called an operation. An operation in a work order is an executable job performed on a Production Unit of a Production Line. Operations can be defined either in the route using the Route Editor module or in the work order that you import from an ERP system.

When all the operations are completed, the status of the work order changes to Completed in the Work Queue application.

Note: If BOM parts are configured for an operation and marked as mandatory, the operation is marked complete only if the BOM parts are consumed. Similarly, if quality variables are configured for an operation, the operation is marked complete only if values for the quality variables are provided.

The quantity of the product to be manufactured determines the number of serial numbers that are created.

Work Orders, Operations, and Sequence Numbers in a Motor Manufacturing Unit

Suppose you want to manufacture the following motors:

3 motors of model A
2 motors of model B

The following table provides the work orders, operations, and serial numbers for the plan.


Work Order Number	Work Order Description	Operations	Serial Numbers
W.O 1	To manufacture motors of model A	Shell turning Rotor assembling End shield assembling Painting	W.O.1_S1 W.O.1_S2 W.O.1_S3
W.O 2	To manufacture motors of model B	Shell turning Rotor assembling End shield assembling	W.O.2_S1 W.O.2_S2

Suppose Operator 1 wants to work on the shell turning operation for the two types of motors. Operator 1 can clock on the following serial numbers.


Work Order Number	Operation	Serial Number
W.O 1	Shell turning	W.O.1_S1
W.O 1	Shell turning	W.O.1_S2
W.O 1	Shell turning	W.O.1_S3
W.O 2	Shell turning	W.O.2_S1
W.O 2	Shell turning	W.O.2_S2

Suppose Operator 2 wants to work on the rotor assembling operation. When Operator 2 logs in to the application, Work Queue displays the rotor assembling operation only after the shell turning operation has been completed for at least one serial number.