A work center in Business Central is a capacity resource, such as a team or an area, with a calendar, costs and efficiency that routings consume when scheduled.
A work center represents where work happens and how much of it can be done per day. It carries a shop calendar, a capacity, an efficiency percentage and cost fields such as direct unit cost and overhead, plus the posting group used when capacity is posted. Machine centers can be attached below a work center when you need to plan individual machines rather than a whole area.
Search with Alt+Q for Work Centers and open a card. The scheduling fields hold the shop calendar code, the capacity and the efficiency, and the calendar itself has to be generated for a date range before the work center offers any availability. Work center groups let you report on several work centers together, and the posting fields decide which general ledger accounts capacity values reach.
Work center 100, called Assembly, uses a shop calendar of eight hours a day from Monday to Friday, capacity 2 and efficiency 95 percent. Its direct unit cost is 65.00 CHF per hour. An operation that needs 330 minutes therefore represents 5.5 hours, so roughly 357.50 CHF of capacity value that is posted when output is registered on the production order.
The most common failure is a work center whose calendar has not been calculated for the coming months: scheduling then finds no available capacity and production orders end up with dates that make no sense. Setting efficiency or capacity to zero has the same effect. A missing general product posting group causes an error only at posting time, often long after the setup was done, and changing the unit cost basis after operations have already been posted makes cost comparisons across periods misleading.
Review planned load per work center before you confirm delivery dates, rather than after, since a routing will happily schedule beyond realistic capacity if the calendar allows it. Recalculating calendars once a year, before the planning horizon reaches the new period, avoids most scheduling surprises.
A work center is a broader capacity unit such as a team or an assembly area. A machine center is an individual machine that belongs to a work center and has its own calendar and costs.
Usually the shop calendar code is missing or the work center calendar has not been calculated for the date range you are planning in.
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