Assets & resources
The machines, and everything they consume.
The asset, its spare parts, who sells them and what it costs to replace them. It is the least glamorous part of an operation and the one that moves the most money, because this is where it is decided whether a machine stops for two hours or two days.
Purchasing
The order that raises itself
Inventory
Spares and general materials
Assets
The hierarchy of your machines
Purchasing
The order nobody had to remember to place.
Buying in a plant usually goes like this: somebody notices something is missing, tells somebody else, that person writes it on a scrap of paper, and three days later somebody asks whether it was ordered. FluX removes the three steps in the middle. The order is born where the shortage is spotted, and from there it follows a path you can see end to end.
An order is born in two ways.
Stock hits its minimum
Every spare carries its minimum. When available stock crosses it, an alert reaches the person in charge and, if the item has automatic replenishment switched on, the order creates itself. And it does not ask for a random quantity: it asks for exactly what is missing up to the maximum you set.
- Minimum, maximum and critical per item
- Asks for exactly what is missing
- Alerts even when it does not self-order
- Switched on item by item
Someone requests it from their phone
Whoever notices the size L gloves have run out is the one wearing them. Anyone can request a purchase from their phone, whether it is PPE, fasteners, raw material or anything else, without having to track somebody down or wait for Monday's meeting.
- Any role can request one
- PPE, fasteners, raw material, anything
- With urgency and a reason
- No hunting anyone down the plant
And from there you see it end to end.
Five states and not one more, because an order can only be in five places. Every change records who made it and when, so the question "was this ever ordered?" stops existing.
Material orders
Pending
Waiting for approval
Approved
You pick the supplier
Ordered
Sent to the supplier
Received
Restocks on its own
On approval, you choose who you buy from.
The same bearing is sold by three suppliers, at three prices and three lead times. In FluX every item can carry several, each with its own catalogue reference, and one marked as preferred. When you approve the order you choose, and the order records who it went to. If the preferred one takes three weeks, you switch without redoing anything.
- Several suppliers per item
- Each with its own reference
- One preferred, and switchable
- The order records who it went to
Suppliers for this item
SKF 6205-2RS bearing
- Suministros Industriales VigoPreferredREF 6205-2RS-C3
- Rodamientos del NorteREF SKF62052RS
- Técnica Naval FerrolREF RD-6205
And when it arrives, stock goes up on its own.
Marking an order as received is not ticking a box: it is what puts the units back in the store. No retyping quantities, nobody forgetting to update the spreadsheet, and none of the classic "it says four but there are none". The loop closes where it started.
- Receiving restocks
- No retyping quantities
- History keeps date and person
- And the minimum goes back on watch
Why this changes the working day
Friction is what breaks the process
If ordering something means finding the manager, finding the notebook and remembering on Monday, nothing gets ordered until it is already urgent. And urgent is bought expensive and in a hurry. Removing the three steps in the middle is what prevents the panic buy.
Downtime waiting for a part is the costliest
A machine stopped waiting for a twenty-euro part costs the same as one waiting for a two-thousand-euro part. A minimum on watch is the difference between restocking in time and restocking with the line down.
The operator stops being a bottleneck
When whoever spots the shortage can raise it in three taps, they stop depending on somebody walking past their area. Information travels up on its own instead of waiting for somebody to come down and fetch it.
And it all feeds the cost
Every received order feeds the asset cost and the inventory value shown on the dashboards. Nothing to reconcile at month end: the number is already there.
Inventory
Spares and consumables, finally in the same place.
In most companies they live apart: maintenance keeps the spares and purchasing keeps the general materials, in two spreadsheets that never agree. Here they are together, and a tab with counters answers instantly how much of what you hold is a machine spare and how much is material that gets used up.
They are two different axes, so they combine: "show me the machine filters, grouped by category" is a single question.
- Minimum, maximum and critical flag
- The spare hangs off its asset
- Goes up when you record what arrives
- And down when consumed on an order
- Its value shows on the resources board
What I am looking at
- EverythingBoth natures together
- From an assetThe spare hangs off its machine
- General materialConsumables, PPE, supplies
How I look at it
- TableTo filter, sort and export
- CatalogueWith a photo, to recognise the part
- By categoryGrouped, to see the whole
And now the store also knows how to go up.
Until today stock only grew by receiving a purchase order, and Purchasing belongs to the AI Enterprise plan: anyone on the base plan had an inventory that only knew how to go down. Goods receipt records what arrives, from the computer or from the phone on the loading bay itself, and it is in all three plans.
Administrator, manager and technician record it. The operator does not.
Supplier, delivery note and date
And line by line, including what arrives and is not in the catalogue yet.
You enter what came in
Not the new total. FluX does the sum, which is exactly where whoever keeps it by hand gets it wrong.
With a photo of the note
Attached to the entry, and with it who received it and when.
And it cannot be edited
It moved stock, so it is history: a mistake is corrected with another entry. That is how any serious warehouse works, and it is what an auditor wants to see.
And the photo can fill in the form.AI Enterprise
The material reaches the loading bay, you photograph the delivery note and the form fills itself: the AI pulls out the lines, matches each one to an item of your catalogue and reads «3 boxes of 12» as 36 units. You review it, you approve it, and inventory updates. Anything that does not add up is left flagged for you to look at, rather than picked on its own.
The AI proposes, you confirm. It never writes into the store on its own.
Assets
A machine is not a row on a list.
A bottling machine has a motor, and that motor has a drive. If the three are loose rows, the machine's history does not exist: it is scattered across three places and nobody joins it up. In FluX assets hang off one another, so the line's record includes what happened to its parts.
And above all of that sits the company structure: every asset lives in a location, and every location in a site. That is what lets you look at one plant alone or the whole fleet with the same dashboard, without anything mixing.
- Three-level hierarchy
- A record with the full history
- With its spares and its documents
- Filterable by site
Grandparent
The line, the vessel, the installation
Parent
The machine hanging off it
Child
The component hanging off the machine
Orphan
The one that stands alone, which is fine too
Meters
Maintenance by real use, not by calendar.
A motor that has run 400 hours this month does not need the same as one that ran 40, even though the same days passed on the calendar. A meter counts hours, kilometres or cycles, and usage-based plans trigger on that reading rather than on a date. The machine that works more gets serviced more, which is the only thing that makes sense.
- Hours, kilometres or cycles
- The plan triggers on the reading
- It warns when a reading goes stale
- No invented readings
Main motor · Extruder line A
Running hours
Preventive plan every 500 h
And what holds all of it up
Suppliers
Every supplier with their contact, their site and the items they serve. When an order goes out, the email reaches a supplier registered in your account, not an address typed by hand: nothing can be sent anywhere from your company's domain.
Files
The manual, the certificate, the invoice and the exploded-view photo, kept where they belong. When you upload a document from a machine's record, its folder is created on its own: no maintaining a folder tree by hand that always ends up a mess.
Shall we look at your store on the call?
Tell us which spares leave your line stopped and we will set up the minimum and the automatic order in front of you. In thirty minutes you know whether this removes your panic buys.