Lesson 9: The production report

Goal: hand over the parts you do not nest yourself. The HDF fronts, rails and side panel go to a factory that cuts them, so they need a list of their own, and the shop needs its hardware list.

Time: five minutes.

The Production Report is the shop side of the same model: organized parts lists, material usage and raw costs with no profit markup. You read its Total Cost in Lesson 7; this lesson works through its tabs, for the people who cut and assemble.

1. Read the report

Open the Production Report from the toolbar or menu. Summary cards count cabinets, sheet parts, total area and hardware. Two banners appear only when needed: stocks missing cost data, and panels whose measured thickness differs from their stock by more than 0.5 mm.

The Sheets tab has one row per stock. Expand HDF 18mm: every door and drawer front with its cut length and width, thickness, area and raw cost, a grain arrow on the length, and HDF Black in the Material column of the five fronts you painted in Lesson 5, and of the rails and side panel from Lesson 6, listed under the names you typed. The countertops get their own Marble 40mm row. The Hardware tab counts hinges, legs and drawer rails with their unit cost.

2. Export the HDF list as CSV

1. Press Customize & Export.
2. Section: Sheets. Detail Level: Flat Detail. Filter by Stock: HDF 18mm. Keep the CSV Dimension Unit at millimeters.
3. Tick Group identical parts (adds Qty), and under Columns keep what the factory needs: part, material, length, width, thickness and the quantity.
4. Press CSV and choose where to save it. The file is UTF-8 with a byte order mark, so Arabic names open correctly in Excel.

Parts merge into one line only when stock, material, cut size, thickness, grain, outline shape, engravings and production notes all match exactly. Part type is ignored on purpose, so a left door and a right door of the same size become one line with a quantity of two. Anything that differs keeps its own line.

Read the file with that rule in mind. The white fronts share lines by size; the five black fronts sit apart because their material differs; the rails and the side panel appear under their instance names; and the countertops are absent, because the filter left the marble out. That is the order the factory needs, and it is why Lesson 5 changed a material rather than adding a stock.

3. Print the shop's lists

From the Sheets tab's Export menu, Print by Stock gives one cut list per stock, for handing each material's stack to the saw; each printout states the grouping rule at the bottom, so the operator knows what a quantity means. From the Hardware tab, Shopping List (Print) is the purchase list: item and quantity only.

Checkpoint: a CSV containing only HDF parts with a Qty column, the black fronts on their own lines, a printed MDF cut list, and a hardware shopping list.

What can go wrong

• Data is scanned on open and on Refresh only. After editing the model or the catalog, refresh before you export.
• Sheet counts and waste are deliberately absent here. That is what Nesting computes.
• The Cost column is the pre-markup figure. The Components Manager's Price column and the Customer Pricing report include the margin, so the two intentionally differ.

Reference: Production Report.

Next: What's next.