Introduction to Production Control

Who is this for ?

What you will learn:

Production Control helps you find bottlenecks in your production plan and fix them before they turn into missed deliveries.

The app has five pages. Each one answers a different question.

The pages work together rather than replacing each other. Most investigations pass through several of them. See From finding a problem to fixing it below.

In Pelico, an equipment is a part marked as such. It is usually the finished or assembled item that a work order produces or repairs. It is what comes out of your process, not what goes into it.

A sub-equipment is an assembly relationship. Pelico works it out from what your work orders actually consume, not from a fixed bill of materials. A sub-equipment of equipment E is a component consumed by E's work orders that is itself marked as an equipment. The reverse relationship is the parent equipment: the equipment that consumes a given part.

Two things follow from this:

💡 Because Pelico works this out from real consumption, the hierarchy shows how you build the product today, not how the bill of materials says you should.

Coverage answers one question: does this work order have the material it needs, when it needs it ?

Pelico checks every component the order needs, then gives the order the worst status among them. One missing component blocks the whole order.

In short:

💡The difference between yellow and red is whether a solution exists, not how close you are. Yellow means the plan works if people follow it, so chase the supply. Red means no on-time delivery from your current plan will fix it. You need new supply, or you need to reduce the need.

People confuse these constantly, and they measure different things.

The two are independent. A work order can be:

⚠️ The Late WOs column on the Equipments page counts orders that are late by date. It does not count blocked orders. A plant with many late orders and good coverage has a scheduling problem, not a material problem, and the fix is different.

Wherever you see a problem, you can create an escalation ticket to pass it on and work on it with colleagues. If a ticket already exists, Pelico shows its tier instead of the Escalate button. If several tickets exist on the same object, you see the highest tier.

About tiers

💡 Tiers are a shared way of talking about priority, not a workflow tool. If your organisation wants Tier 4 to mean "management is involved", that rule lives in your process, not in Pelico.

The Work Order Book and the Equipments planning view both let you type simulated values to test a change without touching your ERP. Results appear in their own columns, next to the planned values, so you can see the difference: Simulation Start Date, Simulation Quantity, Current Simulation.

Both entry points write to the same simulation. Values you type in the planning view and in the Work Order Book form one scenario, and both views read from it.

See Simulations for the full picture.

This page lists every work order in your scope, with the soonest planned start date at the top. Each line gives you the status and the key facts for one order, plus quick actions to deal with problems or test a change.

The list shows all work orders for your plant. A group-by filter lets you rearrange them by equipment, MRP code, buyer code or production version.

Columns

Hidden columns. More columns exist, specific to your routines and plants. Open the columns panel on the right to choose which ones to show. Hover over any column header to see what it means.

It does not include your production capacity. There is no work centre limit in this calculation. Capacity is handled elsewhere.

The calculation assumes that upstream production will happen. This is why an order can come out as conditionally covered with a suggested date, rather than blocked.

💡Read the three date columns together. Planned is what the plan says. Suggested is what Pelico thinks is achievable, given material and upstream work. The gap between them is your exposure. Simulation is what you are thinking of doing about it.

The graph shows work order status over time, so you see how coverage changes rather than reading order by order.

This makes it quick to spot the weeks where problems pile up.

Filters

This page looks at coverage from the material side. It shows which parts are missing, in order of urgency, and when each shortage bites. It lets you act on the bottleneck itself rather than on its symptoms.

Its strength is density. One screen carries the shortage, its urgency, its cause and your options.

View settings

⚠️ Work order sorting does not reorder the part rows. It only affects the columns across the top. Row order is fixed. See below.

Pelico applies four rules in order:

So the ranking is really how soon the part runs short, then how serious it is. You cannot change this order, and there is no other sort available in this view.

💡 This matters when you read the page. The part at the top runs short soonest. It is not necessarily the one affecting the most orders, or the most revenue. For a value-based ranking, use the Opportunities page instead.

💡 Switch between Need quantity and Projected stock to separate two questions: how much you need, and whether you will have it. They rarely tell the same story.

The legend changes slightly depending on which measure you display.

Green and yellow are the same in every mode.

Part rows and work order columns can have different filters. This means you may see work order columns that do not consume any of the parts in your rows.

To fix this:

The view then shows only work orders that consume at least one of the parts in your rows.

This page organises everything by what you produce, rather than by individual orders. It answers the delivery question: will these products come out, and if not, when do they stop ?

Projected Coverage settings, top right of the table:

💡Production Stop Date is the column to watch. It turns a material problem into a date, and a date is something you can tell operations and your customer.

A week by week view of status and projections for each equipment. Each row is one equipment.

The input row is a full simulation. What you type here goes into the same simulation as the Work Order Book and the Simulation Basket. It is not a scratchpad. That means you can save it as your own simulation with a name and description, publish it so it becomes the shared reference plan, commit it to the execution plan inside Pelico, or push it to your ERP. These are separate actions with different effects. See Simulations.

💡You can simulate at whichever level suits your question: volume in the planning view, or individual order dates in the Work Order Book. Both land in the same scenario, so you never need to redo the work in the other view.

Two projection rows sit next to each other in the planning view, and the difference between them is the most useful signal on the page.

Both start from the same stock on hand. Both use the same external supply: purchase orders, purchase order line schedules, incoming transfers, forecasts. Both apply the same consumption.

They differ on one point: what they do with the output of a production order whose own components are short.

Which one to use. Use Conditional projection for real planning. It shows where stock runs out once you stop trusting output from orders that are short themselves. Use Stock level as a best case, to see whether the plan would work if the blocks were cleared.

💡Read the gap, not just the rows. A difference between the two is your warning about internal supply at risk. If Stock level stays positive but Conditional projection goes negative, that part is only covered if somebody clears an upstream block. The gap tells you where to push.

The Line of Balance shows shortages across time. This page gives you the missing parts with the full story on each one: the events around it, and what you can do.

The list runs as a timeline, from the oldest delay to the most recent.

💡Parent Assemblies shows a count in the cell and names on hover. The tooltip lists up to five equipment names, then "+N more". A high number means the shortage reaches widely: one part holding up several product lines.

This page gives you a ranked list of alerts about current and future bottlenecks. Each alert carries a headline impact figure and a set of tasks with due dates and recommended actions.

Open an alert to see links to each related work order and the value of fixing the problem. That is what makes this page useful for choosing what to do: you can rank by what an action is worth, not by how urgent it feels.

Alerts are sorted by total impact, highest first. The top of the page is where the most value sits.

In Production Control, impact is measured as delay volume, in number of equipments. Pelico calculates each figure on a schedule, and the headline is the total across that alert's tasks.

Pelico defines the list of alert types. Examples include:

💡"Work orders with only a single blocking part" is often the most valuable alert on the page. One part fixed, one order unblocked. It is the cheapest coverage you will buy all week.

What you will see. Your configuration decides which alert types are switched on, so your list may not include all of the above. The filters available to you, plant part, buyer code, customer, gate, MRP controller, part family, come from your own data.

Every page shows a WO Coverage figure in the top right corner, so this headline measure stays visible wherever you are.

How Pelico calculates it:

⚠️ Two figures share this name and they are calculated differently. The top right indicator counts conditionally covered orders as covered. The per-group WO Coverage column inside the work order score table does not: there, only fully covered orders count. If your header figure and your table figure disagree, this is why.

Part names and work order numbers are links throughout the app. They open the Part 360 and Work Order 360 views, which gather everything Pelico knows about that object. When a line raises a question the page cannot answer, the 360 view is your next step.

Anything shown with a blue underline has a 360 view behind it.

You can create an escalation ticket or add a comment from every page where a problem appears. The object you are looking at is the object you escalate, so nothing needs retyping and no context is lost.

Every page follows the same pattern. Filters sit near the page name at the top. The columns panel is on the right. Once you have a filter and column set-up you like, save it as a routine with the 💾 icon, and load it next time instead of rebuilding it.

💡Working from a list? You can paste several values into a filter at once. If you have ten supplier codes in a spreadsheet, copy the column and paste it straight into the filter.

The pages are meant to be used in sequence. A typical path:

💡 Steps 5 and 6 are the ones people skip. Finding a bottleneck is the easy half. Confirming you have not moved it somewhere else is what makes your plan credible.