Job Management Software for Materials Handling

Both can live as jobs in the same system.

Keep those hours and purchases on the same project.

That is exactly why keeping purchasing against the job matters.

Keep both sides tied back to the same job.

Yes, and keeping them together gives you something most materials handling businesses lack: the relationship between the two. Installations become service customers, and the equipment you built five years ago is the equipment you are maintaining now. Running builds and service work as jobs against the same customer — and, through asset management, against the same equipment — is what makes that history usable rather than anecdotal.

Through project purchasing. Motors, gearboxes, drives, belting, idlers, bearings and control components go on purchase orders raised against the job, so the component cost sits with the system it went into. On materials handling the bought-in content routinely exceeds your own fabrication value, which changes where the commercial risk lives — you can run an efficient workshop and still lose the job to a drive package that was priced from a superseded supplier list.

Yes, as separate tasks on the same job. That structure is worth insisting on, because controls and mechanical work behave nothing alike: mechanical scope is visible and estimable, while controls work expands quietly through integration, testing and whatever the customer’s existing plant turns out to be running. A job that reports one combined figure will consistently blame fabrication for overruns caused in the control cabinet.

Yes, recorded as its own tasks. Materials handling is design-led more than it appears — every installation is shaped by the building it goes into, the product being moved and the rate required — and that engineering is genuinely chargeable work. Businesses that treat it as part of winning the job end up carrying substantial unpaid design on tenders that never convert, and the only way to know how much is to have recorded it.

Yes. Workshop fabrication and site installation record against the same project, ideally on their own tasks so the two remain comparable. For materials handling the site component is the volatile one, because installations happen inside operating plants with access windows, isolations and other trades. Keeping site hours separate is how you find out whether your installation rate has ever reflected working around someone else’s production schedule.

The work runs as a job like any other; what changes is the cost profile. Shutdown installations compress labour into a short window, frequently at penalty rates, with severe consequences for overrun. Record the hours as they happen against the job so the true cost of shutdown work is visible. Contractors who price shutdown installation at their standard rate are usually subsidising it out of the equipment margin.

Yes, as tasks with their own hours. Materials handling equipment is bought to achieve a throughput, which means commissioning is not finished when the machine runs — it is finished when it runs at the specified rate with the customer’s actual product. That gap is where the hours go. Costing commissioning separately across installations is what eventually tells you which applications reliably cost more to prove than the quote assumed.

Yes, as project documents. Conveyor and materials handling installations carry guarding, isolation and safety documentation that the customer needs at handover and their auditors ask for afterwards. Keeping it attached to the job rather than in a shared drive means the request two years later is answerable without finding whoever ran the project.

Yes, as jobs against the customer and, where you use asset management, against the equipment itself. Breakdown response on installed plant is commercially unusual because the customer’s cost of downtime dwarfs your invoice, which gives you considerable pricing latitude that most businesses do not use. Knowing your own cost to respond is the starting point for that conversation.

No. Your design package models the system and your control software programs it. WorkGuru handles the job around both — the quote, the procurement, the fabrication, the site work, the commissioning and the margin. The join is the bill of materials and the programme: design determines what is needed, purchasing commits to it, and job costing records what the whole thing returned.