M-Power Introduction & Terminology

The following article describes some of the terminology commonly used in M-Power (Bold text) and the synonyms of those terms widely used by businesses (Blue text).

M-Power is a Management Information System (MIS) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) all in one. 

Products are the finished items that you sell to your clients. A business might refer to or know a product as Finished Goods or Sold Items.

Recipes are the umbrella term for a collection of Materials and Operations needed to manufacture a product. Recipes, often called Bill of Materials (BOMS) in other systems, would be documented as Work Instructions, Work Tickets, Works Orders or Job Cards for your teams. 

Materials are the raw inputs into the manufacturing process. In general manufacturing, the list of raw materials required for a product is often referred to as a Bill of Materials (often shortened to BOM). In M-Power, we extend the idea of materials to include all inputs to production, wherein you pay money to third parties. Examples of such inputs include Outwork, Services, machine hire and freight. Materials are purchased using purchase orders.

Operations are the term M-Power uses for the processes needed to turn the materials into a finished product. Operations and Processes are often used interchangeably, but strictly speaking, processes are individual manufacturing tasks. In contrast, operations include the other tools we use to manage production, like statuses, events and tags. Other similar terms that relate to operations include Routing and Workflow.

Jobs are our top-level manufacturing tasks. In most cases, a job will mirror a client's purchase order to you and contains manufacturing instructions for all products requested on a purchase order. A job raised in this manner is easy to convert to a delivery docket and an invoice that matches the client's original purchase order. In some cases, however, you may prefer to break the contents of a client's purchase order into individual products or segments to make it easier to manage. There will be multiple jobs to one client purchase order in this case.