Guides for planning orders, running routes, tracking time, and shipping deliveries in Building Swell, the production system for prefab shops.

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Getting Started

What Building Swell does, and where to start based on the job you do.

Welcome to Building Swell

Get logged in, set up your profile, invite your team, and find your way around the Rules Engine.

Quick Start Guide

Find your way around Building Swell, module by module, on desktop and on a phone.

General Navigation

What stages, steps, routes, phases, orders, and projects each mean, and how they fit together.

Key Terminology

Update your name, your details, and your password from your profile.

Updating Your Info

Ask the built-in AI assistant about your shop, and approve the actions it proposes before they run.

BSWL Assistant

Company & People

Add and manage the projects your orders are built against.

Projects

Organize your teams into departments, and set their hours, shifts, holidays, and availability.

Departments

Add the people on your shop floor, record their skills, and import or archive them in bulk.

People

Invite people to Building Swell, set their role, and deactivate them when they leave.

Managing Users

Control what each person can see and do, using Admin or a custom role built from read, create, update, and delete permissions.

Roles

Set up overhead tasks so time not tied to an order still gets logged somewhere.

Overhead

Record time off and extra hours for one person or a whole team, and see it before you plan around them.

Availability

Routes & Shop Logic

Create and manage the stations and work steps your routes are built from.

Stages and Work Steps

Edit, duplicate, and archive routes, and understand Process versus Department routes.

Managing Routes

Create a route and lay out the stages an item passes through to be finished.

Adding a New Route

Set up the phase templates your orders are built from, and mark which ones can ride on a delivery.

Phases

Build the reason list captured when work is reworked or put on hold.

Cycle Time, Duration, and Float

Planning & Orders

Find your way around the Orders page and what it shows you.

Intro to Orders

Add orders, split them into components, and keep your production schedule current.

Managing Orders

One shared schedule of everything in progress: what is coming, how it is sequenced, and where it stands.

Planning

Track how far along work is, by stage and by project.

Progress & Man Hours

Export production data to a spreadsheet, change it in bulk, and bring it back in.

Exporting Production Reports

Export your planning data to a spreadsheet, edit it, and import it back.

Planning: Import & Export

Save the columns, filters and settings you use on a page, then choose who else can see it.

Planning Views

Sync a Smartsheet with Building Swell in both directions, and map its statuses to real progress.

Smartsheet Integration

See every change made to an order, who made it, and when, from the History tab.

Order History

Materials

Build your item catalog, and read On hand, Reserved, Available and On order correctly.

Materials and Parts

Find where stock is sitting, scan straight to a location, and know what moves a quantity.

Storage and Locations

Build a list of material to pull, walk it by location, and stage it for the work that needs it.

Pick Lists

Watch what material is due in, and receive it into stock when it arrives.

Inbound Deliveries

What the words on the inventory screens mean, and which stock figure answers which question.

Materials Terminology

Time & Staff

Manage your team's logged hours by department.

Timesheets

The ways hours get logged in Building Swell, from the Build page to Timesheets, and when to use each.

Tracking Time

See what every worker is doing right now, their status, their tasks, and when they checked in.

Staff Overview

Set up your teams, plan them around skills, and tie them to the stages they run.

Planning Shop Teams

Split each day's paid hours across your own payroll categories.

Pay Types

Shop Floor

Your live shop floor view: every active order, who is on it, and how far along it is.

Build

Check your shop team in and out for the day, by hand or by QR scan.

Attendance

Print QR codes for orders and people, then scan them in Build to check in, open drawings, and read an order.

Using QR Codes

Check attendance and assign your shop crew to stages from the Build page.

Daily Team Planning

Set a dead time threshold per department and get told when someone is on the clock but not on work.

Dead Time Alerts

Assign people to orders and stages from a phone or tablet using the new mobile assignment tray.

Assigning People on Mobile

Deliveries

What a delivery is, where it lives, the directions and statuses, and what to set up first.

Intro to Deliveries

Create the trip, load the cargo, and lay out the stops and transit legs.

Creating and Scheduling a Delivery

Start transit, work the stops from the no-login driver page, confirm what arrived, and cancel or archive a trip.

In Transit and Receiving

Forms & Documents

Connect an external document account so your team always opens the current shop drawings.

Document Integration

Build inspection templates, version them, and attach them to routes as planned or ad hoc forms.

Forms

Review where and how location was captured on deliveries, forms, and QR scans.

Geolocation Events

Upload documents, attach them to work, and control which version the crew sees.

Documents Hub

Insights

Read the shop and project dashboards in Insights to see how production is performing.

Dashboards

Settings

Set aside orders, routes, people, teams, and shifts you no longer use, and bring them back from the Archive Bin.

Archiving and Restoring

Set your subscription template once, follow the work you care about, and only hear what matters.

Notifications

Create and manage API keys so other systems can talk to Building Swell.

API Keys

Check whether scheduled jobs and background work ran, and read the errors when they did not.

System Log

Fire a form automatically when work is reworked, put on hold, or has its due date changed.

Form Triggers

Add your own fields to orders, and get them onto exports and dashboards.

Custom Properties

Set up your vendors, contacts, locations, trucks, and units of measure so Building Swell picks values from a list instead of retyping them.

Catalogs

Browser and device tips that sit outside Building Swell itself.

Miscellaneous

Prefer the desktop layout on your tablet? Here's how to request the desktop site in Safari, Chrome, and Edge.

Requesting the Desktop Site on Mobile

Put Building Swell on your phone's home screen so it is one tap away.

Adding Building Swell to Your Phone

Clear your browser cache when pages load stale or look wrong.

Clearing Cache

Templates & Daily Guides

The shape of a shop day, in order, with a pointer to the fuller guide for each part.

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