S3 EnterpriseHow the parts fit together
The guide
Pick a part on the left. Each one shows every screen in it: its picture, what it is for and where it leads. The pictures are a demo company, Foundry Valves, so their names and numbers are made up. Click a picture to see it bigger.
Foundry runs a manufacturing company in one place: selling, buying, the stores, making, quality, the machines and the assets, and the accounts that come out of all of them. This page is the way in. It says what each part is for, how the parts hand work to each other, and where to read and look next.
The parts on the left rail
The rail on the far left has one icon a part. Clicking one opens its menu beside it. A part's menu has up to four views, switched by the icons at its top: the work (what people do every day), masters (the lists the work picks from), reports, and settings.
| Part | Pages | Holds, for example |
|---|---|---|
| Home | 1 | What is waiting on you, and what is late |
| Desk | 1 | The owner's view: the month's money, orders, stock and what is wrong |
| Sales | 56 | Leads, quotations, orders, dispatch, invoices, receipts, complaints; customers and prices |
| Purchase | 29 | Requisitions, supplier quotations, orders, supplier bills and payments; suppliers |
| Items | 38 | Items, stock, the gate, goods received, issues, transfers, counts, batches and serials; stores |
| Production | 39 | Jobs, work orders, the shop floor, daily production, planning, capacity; work centres, shifts |
| Engineering | 10 | Bills of material, drawings, engineering changes, the configurator |
| Books | 8 | Journal vouchers, day book, ledger, trial balance, profit and loss, balance sheet, Tally export |
| Quality | 25 | Inspections, test reports, non-conformances, gauges, audits; inspection templates |
| Maintenance | 17 | Breakdowns, what is due, rounds, the calendar; machines, spares, plans |
| Assets | 13 | Fixed assets, depreciation, moves, hand-overs, verification, insurance |
| Approvals | 1 | Everything waiting for someone's OK |
| Settings | 20 | Company, plants, users, roles and rights, numbering, tax, currencies, layouts, period lock |
How the parts hand work to each other
Nothing in Foundry is typed twice. Each document is made from the one before it (its Make button), and the stock, the accounts and the reports come out of the documents by themselves. Four loops run through the company:
Selling - from a lead to money in
Buying - from a need to the supplier paid
Making - from an order to finished goods
Work a workshop outside does is job work: our material goes out on a challan, comes back processed, and their labour is billed.
Keeping it running
Maintenance keeps the machines up: a breakdown is reported, worked on with spares from the stores, and its downtime lands on the work centre. Planned service falls due by date or by hours run. Assets holds what the company owns - its cost, where it is, who has it, and its depreciation every month into the books.
What works the same everywhere
- Lists: search at the top, filters beside it, New (Ctrl+N) on the right; the count and total at the foot.
- Records: a short header of up to five fields a row, then tabs, the totals on the right; at the foot its status, Print, Make and ... (copy, cancel, revise).
- Status: Draft (still being written, can change) > Submitted / Confirmed / Posted (it counts: stock moved, the books written) > Cancelled (undone, never deleted). A posted document is never edited - it is cancelled or corrected by the next document (a credit note, a return).
- History tab: what a document was made from and made into, and who did what when.
- Approvals: a document that needs someone's OK by the approval rules waits in Approvals until they give it.
- Plants: each document belongs to a plant; stock is held store by store within a plant.
- Keys: Ctrl+N new, Cmd+S save, Cmd+Enter the main action (submit, post), Esc back, Cmd+K search anything.