Routing and process sheets

What a route sheet is

A route sheet — often called a process sheet — is the ordered sequence of operations a work order passes through, each on a work center and each with a standard time. If the Bill of Materials answers what a part is made of, the route answers how it is made: turn, then mill, then heat-treat, then inspect, then transfer to finished goods. It is the manufacturing counterpart of the bill, and the two together — material and route — define a manufacturable part.

The route is not paperwork for its own sake. It is the single object that four different plant functions all depend on: scheduling loads each operation onto its work center; costing turns operation standard times into process cost; WIP capture books good and reject at each operation; and quality hangs in-process inspection off specific operations. Get the route right and all four are grounded in the same definition; get it wrong or leave it on paper and each function invents its own version.

Route sheet vs process sheet

The terms are often used interchangeably, and in most systems they describe the same document from two angles:

• Routing emphasises the sequence — the order of operations and the work centers they run on. It is the scheduling and flow view.
• Process sheet emphasises the detail of each operation — its specifications, parameters and standard time. It is the shop-floor instruction view.

In Fast Production Software they are one object: a process/route sheet that can be held as a master per item, generated order-specific, printed for the floor, and tracked as each operation completes. So there is no gap between "the routing the planner scheduled" and "the process the operator ran" — they are the same released definition.

Anatomy of an operation

Each line of a route is one operation, and a well-formed operation carries:

Those fields are what let the route do work. Without a work center you cannot load capacity or attribute cost; without a standard time you cannot schedule or cost; without a specification you cannot inspect in process. A route that is just a list of operation names is a checklist — a route with these fields is a manufacturing control.

Work centers and capacity

A work center is a machine, station or cell where operations are performed — a lathe, a VMC, a welding bay, an inspection station. Every operation on a route is assigned to a work center, and that assignment is what makes three things possible. It lets a plant load and schedule capacity — how much work is queued on each machine and when it frees up. It lets the system attribute operation cost — the work-center rate times the standard time. And, crucially, it lets rejection be analysed by where it happened: a defect-to-work-center mapping means a plant can see which machine or station is producing the rejects, rather than staring at a single end-of-line total. That defect-to-work-center link is one of the most useful things a route provides to the rejection and rework effort.

Standard times: the backbone

The single most valuable field on a route is the standard time — the expected time to complete one unit of an operation on its work center. Standard times underpin three functions at once:

• Scheduling — how long a job takes on each work center, and therefore when the machine is free for the next.
• Costing — process cost is standard time multiplied by the work-center rate, which feeds BOM costing and quotation.
• Performance — actual time against standard time, the raw input to efficiency and OEE measurement.

This is not a theoretical point. In the reference deployment the operation-time table is the single largest transaction table in the whole database — larger than any BOM or stock table — which is a direct measure of how central standard times are to a working plant. A route without maintained standard times cannot schedule honestly or cost accurately; keeping them current is one of the highest-return disciplines on a shop floor.

Process specifications and in-process inspection

A route becomes a controlled process when its operations carry process specifications — the dimensional or quality parameters an operation must meet: tolerances, settings, checks. Holding specifications on the route means the operator and the in-process inspector work from the same definition, not two separate documents that can drift apart.

That is what enables the in-process inspection branch: an operation can hand off to quality before the next operation runs, so a part is checked at the point it is made rather than only at the end of the line. Catching a dimensional problem at operation 20 instead of at final inspection saves every downstream operation on a part that was going to be rejected anyway. For automotive component makers working to approved processes, in-process inspection gates on the route are not optional — they are how the approved process is enforced job after job. The inspection results flow into Fast Quality on the same platform.

Master route vs order-specific route

Like the BOM, the route comes in two forms. A master process sheet is the standard route for an item, authored once and reused by every work order for that part. An order-specific route is generated against a particular customer order, so a make-to-order job can differ from the standard without rewriting the master. A job shop where every order is slightly different relies on the order-specific route; a repeat-part plant relies on the master. Both are released with the BOM so the floor gets a material definition and a route in one controlled step, and both can be printed for the floor and tracked operation by operation as work progresses.

How Fast Production holds the route

Fast Production Software implements routing as real, exercised modules on the shared Fast Suite platform:

Because it runs on the shared platform, the route feeds scheduling, costing and quality from one released definition — the manufacturing core behind deployments such as Nikhtish Engineering and Solidus Hi-Tech.

Frequently asked questions