Factory positions
The four positions
From highest to lowest. Each one includes everything below it on the floor screen, but not the planning powers of the one above.
Floor supervisor. Runs the factory. Sees To produce with every tab, moves cards across the Board to create job orders, releases them to the floor, can receive them into stock when the warehouse has not put them away, decides who usually makes what, and keeps the artisan roster. One or two people per factory.
Mix preparer. Runs the mixes and bases the artisans depend on. Sees To produce and the Mixes tab, creates job orders for mixes by dragging a card to themselves, and releases and receives only job orders addressed to themselves. Cannot touch anyone else's job order. Works the floor like an artisan.
Foreman. Keeps the operatives in line. Sees everything on the floor and the job orders, can adjust a job order's items and quantities, and can start a task on behalf of someone. Cannot create job orders from To produce, release them, or change who makes what. The person to ask when a task is stuck.
Operative. Makes things. Their screen is Factory → Jobs: the jobs addressed to them, and a START and DONE for each. Can look at To produce and the Board to see what is coming, but cannot move anything on it. Rejects are recorded by the foreman or above, not by the operative.
How a position is given
- Human Resources → Employees, open the person, Edit, then Job Positions (permissions).
- Expand the organisation. Find the Production row.
- Tick one position. If the organisation has more than one factory, choose which factories it applies to.
- Save. The rights, and the factory itself, appear on the person's login straight away. If the Factory section is missing from their sidebar afterwards, ask them to log out and in again.
A person can hold several positions, in the factory and elsewhere. A supervisor who also picks in the warehouse simply has both rows ticked.
Things worth knowing
- The floor is the same screen for everyone. What changes is which jobs appear and which buttons exist, not the layout. Foreman and above also see the open pool of jobs nobody is named on, and can take one.
- Finished goods are the warehouse's job. When the last task is done, the job order appears under Dispatching → From production for a dispatcher to put away. No factory position is needed for that.
- Positions are per factory. The same person can be floor supervisor in one factory and operative in another.
- No position, no factory. Someone with no Production position does not see the Factory section at all, even if they are a supervisor elsewhere.
- Organisation administrators have all of this without a factory position.