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A work center is a location-specific station, machine, or cell where run. It defines scheduling and cost rates and supports one or more processes, such as cutting or welding. operations are assigned to work centers. The work center’s rates price logged labor and machine time, and its calendar constrains scheduling.

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Fields

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Processes

A process is a capability a work center can perform; work centers and processes are many-to-many. A process is Inside, Outside, or both. processes are subcontracted, and suppliers attach to them for outside-processing .

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Rates: estimate vs actual

Rates exist at two layers. When an operation picks a work center, that work center’s rates are copied onto the operation as a snapshot. That’s what drives the cost estimate. The actual labor and machine cost posted to the ledger reads the work center’s live rate at the time the production event was logged. The two can diverge if a rate changes after an operation is planned.

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Capacity and operating hours

A work center is a finite resource: the scheduler places one operation on it at a time, inside its real operating hours. Those hours come from a ladder, first rule wins: Lights Out (24×7) (continuously open) → the work center’s own assigned shifts → the location’s shifts → a stock Mon–Fri, 8-hour week. An open maintenance task that takes the work center offline subtracts its downtime from those hours (lights-out machines included), so the scheduler routes work around a machine that’s down rather than booking it.