Work areas in a manufacturing plant are defined in QAD EE using departments, work centers, and machines.

Departments. A manufacturing plant is split into departments for control purposes. Each production unit (work center) must belong to one, and only one, department. This grouping is used primarily for capacity planning and accounting. GL accounts are attached to each department. At least one department must be defined before you can enter work centers or routings.

Work Centers. A work center is a specific production unit within a department consisting of one or more people and/or machines. In QAD EE, work centers are the most basic units for operation scheduling, capacity requirements planning, and cost determinations for GL transactions. You must have at least one work center in order to set up routings and to report labor.

Machines. You can set up a work center with multiple identical machines by leaving the Machine field blank and entering the number of machines in the Machines field. Then you can specify the number of machines that can be used for each operation (parallel production) in the route operation. If the machines are not completely interchangeable, identify each one with a distinct code. For example, you have multiple similar machines but they run at different rates. Or perhaps an older machine has a higher rate of rejects. In this case, each machine must have a unique machine code. The combination of the work center and the machine identifies a specific machine.