The FabTrk Shop-Floor Pipeline Explained

Projects, Parts, and the Shop-Floor PipelineHow a piece of steel moves through FabTrk: the five part stages, the Fab/Fit/Weld/QC board, one-tap advance, and what the office sees while the floor works.Everything FabTrk shows you about progress is derived from one simple fact: the stage of each individual piece. There are no separate status spreadsheets to maintain and no percent complete fields to guess at. Move the pieces, and every view updates itself. The five part stages Each piece in the BOM is in exactly one of five stages: To Cut → Cut → Fit → Welded → Shipped That is the whole model. A piece that has been burned but not fit up is Cut . A piece tacked into its assembly is Fit . A piece finish welded is Welded . Out the door is Shipped . The pipeline board The dashboard groups those stages into the four columns a shop actually talks in: Fab : pieces still to cut or cut Fit : pieces fit into their assemblies Weld : pieces finish welded QC : pieces through final checks and shipped Assemblies appear in the column their pieces have earned. An assembly's stage is derived from its parts: when the last piece of a frame line reaches Welded , the frame moves to the Weld column on its own. Nothing is dragged, nothing is edited; the board is a report, not a chore. A needs attention lane surfaces assemblies that have stalled so the foreman's first glance lands on the problem, not the healthy work. One tap advance On the floor, a worker opens their task, sees its pieces, and advances a piece to the next stage with a single tap. That tap is the entire data entry burden of the system. Behind it, the BOM updates, the assembly recalculates its stage, the pipeline board moves, and the office dashboards refresh. Advancing parts requires a role with the edit task permission; fitters and operators without it can see their work and log time but not move pieces, which keeps stage data trustworthy. (See the roles guide for exactly who can do what.) My Work Each worker's view starts with My Work : the tasks assigned to them, current first. No hunting through other people's jobs. Tasks carry their drawings and notes, so the answer to "which sheet is this on?" is attached to the work itself. Notes and photos from the floor Any worker with write access can attach a note or a photo to a task: the fit up that needed shimming, the flange that arrived bowed, the finished weld. Photos land in the project record with the task, so the story of the job builds itself as the job runs. Deleting notes is restricted to senior roles; the floor's record is not silently editable. Weights, loads, and shipping Every piece carries a computed weight based on its profile and length; generated parts and imported parts are weighed the same way. Those weights are what the shipping tools total when a truck gets loaded, so the number on the load sheet traces back to the same BOM the shop fabricated from. Why derived status matters Shops that track status in a separate system always end up with two versions of the truth: what the spreadsheet says and what the floor knows. FabTrk has one: the pieces. If the board says a frame is in Weld, that is because its pieces are welded, and you can click through and see exactly which ones. When the model is the same thing the floor touches, the report can't drift from reality.