Once a work order is released, shop floor functions track its progress to record labor and to record material usage and completions. Shop floor requires that at least one employee is set up. The slide shows the relationship between shop floor reporting and the work order process flow.

Labor feedback is done by work order, employee, or work center/machine. In all cases you must identify a released work order. When labor is recorded, operation status is updated to either Setup, Run, or Complete. When work moves to the next operation, its status changes to Queue.

If labor is reported only at a few key operations, called milestones, the Operation Complete Transaction can be used to complete the current operation and the ones that have come before it. If no labor has been reported against these previous operations, actual labor is set to the labor that should have occurred to make the quantity reported complete, referred to as earned labor.

In order to account for all work hours, nonproductive time can also be recorded. This is time not spent working on a specific manufacturing order, such as cleanup time, downtime, meetings, breaks, or time spent waiting for work.