The following text was transcribed from a helpful video created by Ian Creswell, Passport Software’s Executive Vice President/Manufacturing Product Manager.

Let’s explore an exciting feature coming in PBS™ Manufacturing version 12.09. We’ve long offered a couple of barcoded documents that relate to the shop order, specifically the shop order traveler and the shop order routing.

The technology used to develop those was rather restrictive as far as what printers you could actually use. However, we’ve eliminated the need for what’s called a PCL5 compliant printer, and now you can print to almost any Windows printer.

Version 12.09 offers a new report writing tool that creates more modern versions of reports utilizing new barcode versions of the shop order traveler and the shop order routing.

If you use shop floor control, you’re likely familiar with both of these documents. If you don’t, then shop order traveler may be the one that you are most familiar with. These tools will now allow us to do some things with shop orders.

Shop Order Traveler

In the shop order traveler, there are a number of shop orders used to make different items on a particular project. We can select any one of these and can now use a print preview to create a PDF. Once the PDF previews, you can print it. This helpful video walks you through the process.

Technically, you could email the PDF, but the idea now is you have a barcoded document that can be printed to virtually any printer. I’m not telling you to print it to any old cheap printer you might have, though most any laser printer should be fine.

When you’re doing barcoding, you want to use a printer that prints well, has a nice resolution on it, so that you have scannable barcodes when you’re done.

Again, you don’t have the restriction of the PCL5 compliance any longer, which opens you up to numerous printers.

You can also print all of the paperwork for the entire project. If you need help setting that up on your system, give us a call at support. We’ll be happy to assist. It just takes a couple of minutes. What you end up with is a multi-page document:

• Each page represents each of the individual shop orders inside of this project.
• Each of which will have its own separate barcodes, so you can utilize these for doing some of your inventory transactions.
• You can print all shop orders within a particular selected range.

If you’re one that does mass explosions of your shop orders, it’s great because you can do your explosion, get all your new orders, and just run from the first new order in that range to the last and generate all of your shop paperwork at the same time, or at least your shop traveler.

Shop Order Routing

I mentioned the shop order routing. If you’re using shop floor control or manufacturing job costing, this is another tool that is available to you.

The difference here is that it’s just a different document. The shop traveler represents the materials needed and notes related to the order. Shop order routing deals specifically with labor. Again, we can print a barcoded document that no longer requires PCL5 compliance.

Now we can print it without barcodes. We can print it with barcodes. We can do both. If we want an informational routing, we can print that using our print preview. We can generate two reports – one is the informational routing, and the other is the barcode routing.

We do not have to print both. If we just want to print the barcoded version, great. But if you want to have both, you can have them. If you don’t want the barcoded one, you can print without it. The idea here is we can print these documents and we’re no longer restricted to certain printers.

We can select a range or the entire project. This is similar to the shop order traveler program. But this is going to be great because it allows you some flexibility in how we’re generating and utilizing these documents.

You can then use these barcoded routings to begin collecting labor in real-time on the production floor minimizing manual entry of information, speeding up the process and reducing the risk of errors.

If you are a PBS™ customer, please contact your Passport Partner to learn more about Version 12.09. If you are a direct customer, please call the office at 800-969-7900 to learn more.

Explore PBS Manufacturing ERP, an affordable yet robust system designed to serve the needs of small to mid-sized manufacturers. Or, contact us – we are here to help.