Work Centers

A Work Center is a station inside a Production Unit: sewing line 3, cutting table B, the pressing bay. It is where machines physically sit and where an operation actually runs.

The Production Unit is the place that does work. The Work Center is the station inside it. A unit with four stitching lines is one Production Unit and four Work Centers.

Getting there

Awesome bar: Cmd/Ctrl + K → type work center → pick Work Center List.

Click path: Desk → GarmentFlow → Maintenance → Shop Floor → Work Centers.

Or open a Production Unit and use its Shop Floor tab, which lays out that unit's centres with live machine counts.

The tabs

Floor. The identity of the station: Production Unit, name, type, the operation it runs, and its live Status — Production, Off, Idle, Problem, Maintenance, Setup. Tick Default for Operation to make it the station the planner picks first; only one centre per unit and operation can hold that flag, and setting it clears the others.

The operation must be one the Production Unit declares. Pick one it doesn't and the record refuses to save — that guard is what keeps capacity honest.

Cutting Limits. For cutting tables: maximum plies, maximum table length in metres, and the lay-overflow tolerance. The cutting wizard reads these when it proposes a lay plan, so a table that physically holds 80 plies never gets a 120-ply lay.

Capacity. Operators, shift minutes and efficiency %. From those, GarmentFlow derives Minutes per Day (baseline) — the capacity this station contributes before anything is scheduled on it.

Operation Costs. Four hourly rates — electricity, consumables, rent and labour — that add up to a Net Hourly Rate. This is what makes one line genuinely more expensive than another: an automated line with high electricity and low labour, a hand-finishing bay with the reverse.

Machines. The floor grid. Set the number of rows and columns, then drag machines into position. Each tile shows the machine's icon and health colour, with a star on machines marked critical. Click a tile to open the machine drawer; see Machines and repairs.

Machines added without a position flow into the first free tile rather than stacking on top of each other in the corner.

Notes. Free text. Useful for "third socket is dead, use the extension" — the things that never make it into a field.

Work Center Types

Work Center Type is a small master that groups stations of the same kind — Sewing Line, Cutting Table, Pressing Bay — and carries:

• an icon and colour, which is what makes the health board and floor readable at a glance;
• a default operation;
• default cutting limits (max plies, max table length, overflow tolerance) that new centres of that type inherit.

Create the types once, up front. Every centre you add afterwards is three fields instead of ten.

Daily manning

Work Center Manning records how many operators were actually present at a station on a given day. One record per centre per date.

The Capacity tab holds the baseline — what the station can do on a normal day. Manning holds the actual — what it could do today, with two people out sick. Where a manning record exists, it overrides the baseline for that day's available capacity.

Supervisors normally post this from the floor at the start of a shift rather than opening the Desk form.

How a Work Center goes red

A centre's colour on the Maintenance board and on Floor Monitor is rolled up, not typed in:

1. Red — any machine on it has an open breakdown, or its Status is Problem.
2. Amber — a machine is due for service or under maintenance, or its Status is Maintenance.
3. Grey — Status is Off, Idle or Setup.
4. Green — everything else.

So a supervisor reporting one broken machine turns the station red without anyone editing the station.

What to do next

Machines are next: Machines and repairs. To watch the whole plant at once, go to Floor Monitor.