Departments

The Departments page is where you define the teams in your shop — Assembly, Paint Shop, Packing, QC, Cutting, etc. — and group your workstations under them. Once departments are set up, the rest of the system can filter, color-code, pool quantities, and report at the team level instead of station-by-station.

Open it from the main sidebar (Departments) or by navigating to /departments. On accounts that have renamed the module via Naming, you’ll see this called Stages, Teams, Cells, or whatever your team prefers.

Departments page

Departments vs Workstations. A workstation is one specific station — a single saw, a single bench, a single booth. A department is a group of workstations. Assembly Bench 1, Assembly Bench 2, and Assembly Bench 3 are three workstations; together they live under one Assembly department. Many shop-floor features only become useful once stations are grouped this way.

What this page is for
Anatomy of the page
Reading the table
Searching
Reordering departments
Adding a department
Editing a department — the Department panel
The Color field
Assigning workstations to a department
Where Departments show up elsewhere
Shared Planned Qty within department
Deleting a department
Tips and best practices

What this page is for

The Departments page answers one simple question: what teams exist in this shop? Once that’s defined, downstream features pick up:

The Production page’s Departments Kanban view lets each team isolate just their own workstations.
The Workstations Kanban tints every column with its department’s color, making a wide board scannable at a glance.
Custom kanban views can be scoped to a single department, so a Kiosk display at the paint shop only shows paint workstations.
The Share Planned Qty within department workstation toggle pools quantities across the department (see Shared Planned Qty).
Reporting and filtering get a meaningful roll-up: “how much labor has the paint team done this week?” answers cleanly when paint is a department.

Most shops set this up once at onboarding and only revisit it when adding a new team or renaming an existing one.

Anatomy of the page

From left to right across the top:

Search box — free-text search across department name and description.
Show N entries selector — 5 / 10 / 25 / 50 / 100 per page.
Add Department button (top-right).

Below the toolbar sits the departments table, one row per department. The pencil icon on the right opens the edit panel. The leftmost column is a drag handle — see Reordering departments. Standard pagination with a Showing X–Y of Z counter sits underneath.

Reading the table

Column	What it shows
(drag handle)	Grip handle for reordering.
Name	Department name. A small color dot to the left shows the configured color (blank if none set).
Description	Free-text description, truncated if long.
Workstations	A count of workstations currently assigned to this department.
Created	When the row was created.
(pencil)	Opens the edit panel.

The table is sorted by display order, then by name — matching the order departments appear in everywhere else (the Departments Kanban dropdown, the workstation’s department picker, and so on).

Searching

Type into the search box at the top-left. The query matches against:

Name
Description

Search is case-insensitive and uses contains matching. The list refreshes about 300 ms after you stop typing. The query is reflected in the URL so a filtered view is bookmarkable.

Reordering departments

The order of departments here drives:

The order they appear in the Departments Kanban view’s filter dropdown.
The order they appear in a workstation’s Department picker.
The reading order anywhere else departments are listed.

To change it:

Click and hold the grip handle on the left of a row.
Drag the row up or down.
Release.

The new order is saved instantly — no Save button needed. Every other user’s dropdowns reflect the new order within seconds.

The numeric Display Order field in the edit panel controls the same underlying value, useful when drag-and-drop is awkward on a very long list.

Tip. Order departments roughly in the direction work flows — Cutting before Assembly before Paint before Packing — so the kanban view dropdown reads top-to-bottom like your shop’s workflow.

Adding a department

Click Add Department in the top-right. The Department panel slides in from the right with an empty form.

The fields are:

Name (required) — what the team is called. Assembly, Paint, Packing — short and recognizable is better than long and descriptive.
Description (optional) — a sentence or two for clarity. Visible only on this page.
Color — pick a color that this department will use everywhere (see The Color field).
Display Order — numeric tie-breaker for sort order. Usually you set this via drag-and-drop on the list instead.

Click Create to save. The department appears in the list immediately and becomes available in every workstation’s department picker.

Editing a department — the Department panel

Click the pencil icon on any row to open the panel in edit mode. The same form appears as in create mode, pre-filled.

The header has two buttons:

Save — applies your changes.
Delete (red) — removes the department. Asks for confirmation. See Deleting a department.

Changes save with one click — there’s no per-field validation drama, just Name (required) and the rest optional.

The Color field

Every department can have a color picked from a standard color picker:

A swatch is shown next to the Name column on this page.
The same color tints every workstation column on the Production page’s Workstations Kanban — wide boards become much easier to scan when each column visually belongs to a team.
The color also drives the All Departments color-coded view in the Departments Kanban.

Click the Clear button next to the swatch to remove the color entirely (the department then renders with no tint). Otherwise, click the swatch to bring up your browser’s color picker.

Tip. Stick to recognizable colors — green for QC, blue for assembly, red for paint, etc. — and avoid using the same color for two adjacent departments. A wide kanban with rainbow columns is much easier on the eye than uniformly grey ones.

Assigning workstations to a department

Assignment is done from the Workstation panel, not from here. Open Workstations, edit the workstation, pick the department from the Department dropdown, and save. The Workstations count on this page updates automatically.

A workstation belongs to at most one department, and can also be left unassigned (“No department”). Unassigned workstations still function but won’t participate in any department-level features.

Where Departments show up elsewhere

Once a department exists, references to it appear automatically:

Where	What you’ll see
Workstations page	The Department column shows the assigned department name.
Workstation panel	A Department dropdown to pick from.
Production page → Workstations Kanban	Each column tinted with the department’s color.
Production page → Departments Kanban	A Department filter dropdown at the top; pick one to show only its workstations as columns.
Custom kanban views (in App Settings → Kanban Views)	A Department dropdown lets each view be scoped to one department. The Kiosk URL for that view inherits the scope.
Production page → Active employees filter	Filters cascade naturally — when you pick an employee on a workstation that belongs to a department, the department coloring is preserved.
The Client Portal	Job progress is rolled up to department-level “checkpoints” — your customer sees Cutting → Assembly → Paint → Packing rather than a raw list of individual workstations.

The Client Portal use case is especially important: departments are the shape your customer sees. A confused departmental layout means a confused customer-facing tracking page.

Shared Planned Qty within department

Departments unlock a powerful workstation behaviour. When a workstation has the Share Planned Qty within department toggle on (set in the Workstation panel), its planned quantity is pooled across every workstation in the same department that also has the toggle on.

The classic use case: parallel benches that any of the team can pick up.

Assembly has Bench 1, Bench 2, Bench 3, all with the toggle on. A job needs 30 pieces assembled. If Bench 1 does 10, Bench 2 does 12, and Bench 3 does 8 → the job’s assembly step is complete (30/30). Without the department grouping or the toggle, each bench would need its own count to hit 30 independently.

So departments aren’t just a presentational grouping — they’re load-balancing scope for shared work.

Deleting a department

Open the department in the panel → click the red Delete button → confirm. The department is removed permanently.

What happens to workstations that were in it:

The workstations themselves are not deleted.
Their department_id is cleared — they become “No department” workstations.
Any feature that depended on the department (Departments Kanban filter, color tinting, shared-qty pooling) stops applying.
The Client Portal will no longer show a checkpoint for this department.

If you need it back after deletion, you’ll recreate it (which gives it a new ID) and reassign its workstations one by one. There is no “trash” / undo.

Be careful with deletes for live shops. Renaming an existing department, or moving its workstations to a different department, is usually safer than deleting one. The Client Portal layout depends on departments being stable.

Tips and best practices

Set up your departments before your workstations. Adding workstations is a lot smoother when the department picker is already populated.
Match departments to your real teams. If two different sets of people work in the same physical area but on different products, that’s still two departments. If one physical area is staffed by one team, it’s one department — even if it has many workstations.
Don’t go overboard. Most shops are fine with 4–7 departments. If you find yourself needing 15, ask whether some are really workstations under a parent department instead.
Pick distinct colors. The Production Workstations Kanban relies on color to give shape to a wide board. Adjacent departments with similar colors lose that benefit.
Order roughly in workflow direction. Cutting → Assembly → Finishing → Packing reads naturally everywhere the order is reused.
Keep names short and recognizable. “Paint” beats “Surface Finishing & Coatings Department” — they appear on cards, dropdowns, and the Client Portal.
Use departments for the Client Portal layout. Your customer-facing tracking page rolls up to department-level checkpoints. A clean, ordered department list makes the customer experience clean and ordered too. Consider hiding internal-only steps via the workstation’s Exclude from order tracking summary toggle so they don’t muddy the public view.
Rename, don’t delete. If a team is being reorganized, rename or merge rather than deleting — keeps historical data attached to a sensible label.
Combine with shared-qty pooling. If two stations are interchangeable in your shop, putting them in the same department + flipping the share-qty toggle saves the planner from manually splitting planned quantities.