If your team is planning to move from Work Orders or Advanced Repetitive to Production Orders, understanding the process and the enhancements offered by the new module can help your organization confidently navigate the change. In this webinar, Olena Stepovyk walks through what changes, what to watch out for, and how to prepare your organization for a successful transition to QAD Production Orders.
You’ll learn:
The key differences between Work Orders and Production Orders.
The setup areas that matter most.
How Production Orders support mixed-mode manufacturing.
The improvements available with Production Orders.
Why would you not use Production Orders? What is the biggest consideration?
The biggest concern before making the change is whether you need to move your customizations with you.
As with any upgrade, there will be some data cleanup and training required. Based on our experience and what we hear from others who have moved to production orders, there aren’t any disadvantages.
What is the most important of the new 1.4.17 item picking data elements?
The process of allocation, transfer allocation policies, single-lot allocation, pick policies, and issue policies in the Item Master file is probably the most intensive during the transition from work orders to production orders.
It’s very, very flexible about what you want to do, but you have to carefully specify what happens when you set the allocation policy to either detailed or general, and when you set the PIC policy to transfer, or the issue policy to backlash.
Those tools are much improved over the old work orders, so paying attention to that item-picking data frame in item master maintenance is going to be anybody’s biggest challenge.
I noticed a section in the item master about picking logic. Is that for Production Orders only, or does it extend to sales orders as well?
It is only for Production Orders, it doesn’t affect sales order allocations.
What are the big differences between advanced repetitive and repetitive when it comes to Production Orders?
One of the main differences is that with Production Orders, you handle all your work orders the same way. It doesn’t matter if it’s a discreetly manufactured or repetitive item.
When you’re using Advanced Repetitive, your work orders are driven by the production schedule. You enter the scheduled quantity for the day and the production line, and then QAD explodes it into a discrete work order. But this exploded work order is sort of temporary. Every time you re-explode the schedule, the re-exploded order gets updated. As a result, any changes you may have made to the exploded work order manually, for example, added comments, changed quantity, or due date, will get erased.
With Production Orders, the data flow is reversed. You start with orders, and the schedule is generated based on the individual production orders. You can have multiple production orders for the same quantity on the same production line, unlike Advanced Repetitive, where you can have only one work order per day.
Also, because of the reversed data flow, you can modify the Production Order Bills for the exploded orders. With Advance Repetitive, you cannot keep the changes to the exploded work order bill unless you change its status to Released, which turns the order into a non-repetitive one.
There is also a more unified way to store and calculate variances with the Production Orders module.
Other than that, as I mentioned during the presentation, some of the Advanced Repetitive functionality was moved to the Scheduling Workbench, but not exactly the way it used to work before. We had a client who relied on the Line Scheduling Workbench function in the Advanced Repetitive module and lost it when they switched to Production Orders. But we were able to find and offer an alternative solution that worked the way the client wanted.
Are method variances less mysterious with Production Order?
Unfortunately, no. Method variance is still used as the balancing variance for WIP.
by Cathy Helmers | on 6th April 2026 | in Blog, Webinars
