Parent operations offer the ability to group related operations together and bring them onto bespoke quotes in one go.

The benefits of this include the fact that related operations will not be omitted and, from a factory production perspective, the operations can be ‘timed’ as one operation, negating the need to stop and start the different operations within the parent while producing the job.

Parent Operations do not have pricing components as the costs are calculated from the component records from the child operations within it.

Parent Operation Options	Child Operation Options

I have chosen to identify or ‘mark’ the Parent Operation with an asterisk preceding the operation code.

To define an operation as a Parent operation you simply enable the option within the ‘Type’ section of the operation definition.

When an operation has been defined as a Parent Operation, the ‘Components’ tab on the modal switches to ‘Parent Options’…

Operations that are selected as Child Operations within a Parent, remain as independent operations and can still be individually added to quotes as required.

The behavior of the parent operation is defined in the Parent Options tab on the operation.

The first thing to do is to bring the child operations onto the parent.

In this example, I am using Die Punch as the parent operation.

You can search for the Child Operations…

And select the operations to add to the parent.

Only operations of the same type are presented to select from (Job, Section, Side)

The operation order is controlled by the ‘Production Order’ value on each child operation, with the lower numbers appearing at the top of the list.

Once all operations are selected, flag which of them are to enable timing.

The child operations can be configured to be timed separately within the parent if required, see below…

If ‘enable timing’ is NOT set on the child operations the effect is that production timing for all these operations can be captured with just one start and stop on the Parent Operation. In our example we won’t set timing on the child operations as in most instances, you would control timing by the Parent Operation.

You need to determine how printIQ is to calculate make readys and time requirements of the group of operations.

Quoting

When this operation is brought onto a quote, the child operations are all extrapolated and any parameters or component selections to be made are done here…

If a Parent Operation is added to a quote which also contains one of the Child operations, the duplicated child operation is NOT added with the Parent. The other child operations ARE added.

A warning is displayed in the Parent Operation…

The child operations added outside the Parent are not under the control of the parent allowing you more control over the individual operations if needed.

 

The effect of this would be that the operation can only be added as part of the Parent suite of operations and would not be available to select independently itself.

You can simply click the ‘X’ to the right of the child operation to remove it OR click the drop-down under the Parent Operation and uncheck any operations you want to remove from the current quote.

After removing unwanted operations and updating the parameter and / or component values of the child operations, calculate a price on the quote.

When you view the pricing matrix, the Child Operations are presented with a linking line on the left hand side…

You will also notice that the Parent Operation holds the total time for the operations, based on the setting ‘Accumulate time from child operations’ and the make readys are also accumulated.

You will also see there are no costs associated with the parent operation itself as the costs are all calculated with the pricing components of the child operations.

Production (Timing)

In the job details, you can see the Die Punch Operation is ready to run after the printing is complete. You will notice there are no Start / Stop controls on the child operations as we elected to not Enable Timing on any of the individual operations when we added them to the Parent Operation.

Where you have opted to Enable Timing on the child operations, they will appear as locked operations until the preceding operation has been finished…

On the Job Bag, you can see the *Die Punch operation is ready to start. (Timer showing 00:00:00)

The child operations have no Start / Stop control….

If the Parent Operation was configured with the DCR and Strip Out child operations Enabled for Timing, they 
would also appear with timers on them as below…