Production

Production is where your own work becomes part of the record. Setting up a notebook, installing software, printing a return label, checking a device that has come back.

Anything a person does by hand, and that somebody might later ask about, belongs here rather than in a colleague's memory.

Steps are products, not settings

There is no screen where you configure production steps for a service, which surprises most people at first.

A production step is a product of the category production step, placed in the bill of materials in the Mapping tab. That has two useful consequences.

A service produces steps only if somebody put them in its mapping. If a service that should involve work arrives with nothing to do, the mapping is where to look.

And the same step is reusable everywhere. Install software is one product, sitting in as many services as you like, maintained once.

One point about naming. In the bill of materials, production steps are listed like any other article, so their name is what tells them apart. Numbering them and using a consistent prefix keeps a longer bill of materials readable, the way the built-in steps do with [1] Setup Notebook.

Configuring steps requires the advanced mapping mode, which needs an extended licence plan.

Claiming and closing a step

A step passes through three stages, and the middle one exists for a reason.

Stage	What you see
new	a Start button
in progress	Remove processor and Complete, with your name in Processed by
Completed	no buttons, only a timestamp

Start puts your name on the step. Nothing else happens, no dialog. The point is visibility: in a workshop with three people, nobody picks up a device somebody else already has in their hands.

Remove processor hands it back. Use it when you claimed something and cannot finish today, rather than leaving your name on it.

Complete asks for confirmation and then closes the step for good. There is no way to reopen one, so confirm when the work is actually done.

Steps normally run in order. Where the mapping defines steps that sit alongside each other rather than in sequence, they can be worked in parallel.

The counter in the header, showing how many steps are still open, is set when the page loads. Reload to see the current figure.

The last step ends production, not the order

Completing the final step finishes the production stage. equipme then tells you the service is ready to be sent and offers to take you straight to Shipping, which is worth using when you are working through a queue.

What it does not do is close the position. Submitting the shipment does that. Until then the order is still open, now waiting to be sent rather than waiting to be built.

The exception is a service with nothing to ship. There the last production step is the end of the line.

On a return, the last step does more than finish the work. Completing it also moves the device into the customer warehouse and removes the employee assignment, so it can be handed to somebody else. The confirmation dialog sets this out before you commit, and it cannot be undone.

Attaching information to a step

A step can carry additional information from the mapping, for example a link to an external system or an instruction for whoever handles it.

Anything that belongs to this one position rather than to the step in general goes in the internal comment field on the right. That is where a note about a device that arrived scratched belongs, not in the mapping.