Material Control Overview

During the progress of a job, you can use SpoolFab to record the receipt of pipe, fittings, valves, gaskets, and so on. At any given time, it is likely that lack of certain items will impose constraints as to which spools can be fabricated. You can use SpoolFab’s WDTR (Which Drawings To Release) function to help you figure out which spools can be fabricated using the materials available. WDTR can even prioritize spools based on their use of items that are currently scarce.

For example, suppose you have ten six-inch end caps in stock, and you have nine drawings that you would like to release to fab. Of these nine drawings, six use one end cap each and three drawings use four end caps each; everything else you need is in stock. A total of 18 end caps are needed to fabricate all nine spools. If you select all nine drawings and run WDTR, SpoolFab will suggest releasing the six drawings with one end cap plus one of the three drawings that use four end caps.

How to Use Material Control on a given Job

Each time you take delivery of material for the job, record the quantity received. Get into Fabrication Material Control and choose Inventory Update Only. This ensures that every item drawn to date is represented in the inventory list.

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Then choose Tools | Job Inventory/Pricing | Items.

This brings up the Inventory view. You can resize this view by dragging the bottom right corner. Inventory view shows a list of every unique item drawn as shown below.

When a shipment of pipe and fittings arrives for your job, gather up the paperwork and get into Inventory view as shown above. For each item on the bill of lading, double-click on the corresponding cell in the Received column. A dialog for that particular item appears:

Repeat the above for each item in the shipment. If you do this for every shipment as it comes in, your inventory will always be up to date and you will be able to use the WDTR function to help you decide which drawings to release.

Use of WDTR – A Worked Example

Suppose we have a job called GEN18-2A, which has just three drawings with just seven unique items in total. The items on each of the three drawings are summarized below.

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Now suppose we have received 500 ft. of the 3 inch pipe and two of everything else. So we will have plenty of pipe, but will be short some of the other items, as shown below:

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We would like to release to fab as many drawings as possible. Go to Fabrication Material Control and hit List All to select all three spools.

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Hit Take no action for now.

Now go back to the Inventory view and receive one more 3-inch Weld Neck:

Get back to Fabrication Material Control, List All, and select WDTR again:

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Next comes a message that is designed to help avoid accidentally releasing drawings that have not been checked. <cf>

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Hit Yes and dismiss the message about why drawing 000003 could not be released. Resize the window and note that drawings 000001 and 000002 have been released to Fab and the InFab date has been entered as today’s date.

It is also possible to release drawings to Fab without using WDTR, but in doing this you run the risk of releasing drawings for which some materials are missing. You can also return drawings from Fab, or mark them as Complete, Shipped, or Cancelled.

In Inventory view, items on drawings marked as Complete or Shipped contribute to the total shown in the Complete column rather than the In Fab column. So by the time the job is finished, the Complete column should be the same as the Drawn column, and there should be nothing in the InFab column.

In case you need to categorize drawings cancelled in different circumstances (e.g. cancelled before fabrication, cancelled after fabrication etc.), there are three different ways to mark a drawing as cancelled. All the possible drawing statuses are listed on the following page.

Valid Entries for Fabrication Status

On the Fabrication Status table, the Status field accepts a single letter as shown:

Items listed in Receiving Reports are included in the Received quantity, unless the word HOLD is entered in one of the fields Heat No., MTR No, or PMI No.

The In Stock quantity is calculated based on:
    In Stock = Received – In Fab – Complete

Some entries trigger changes to other columns of the status table:
 F-in fab puts the current date in the InFab date column if empty.
 C-complete puts the current date in the Complete date column if empty.

Statuses Y and Z are handled the same as X. You can use them to distinguish groups of cancelled drawings. For example, you could use Y to denote drawings that were heavily revised and then replaced by a different control number.