Documentation

Quick start: your first control plan

Last updated 6 August 2026

This walks the whole loop once, end to end, on a part of your own. At the end you will have a ballooned print, a control plan with a sheet for every operation, and a file on your computer that holds all of it.

• Open the demo
• The free AS9102 tool

What you need

• A drawing, as a PDF or an image. Only the first page of a PDF is used, so split a multi-sheet print first.
• A desktop or laptop. ctrlPlanner is a keyboard-driven grid and it says so on a phone rather than pretending otherwise.
• Ten minutes.

1. Start the plan

1. Open the app. The first page is titled Recently opened.
2. Drag your drawing onto the drop zone, or press New Part and add the drawing in the wizard.
3. A PDF has its first page rendered to an image in your browser. Nothing is uploaded to do it.
4. The part number is filled in from the file name. Correct it, then add revision, customer and description.
5. At the operations step, pick a saved process template or choose to build a custom op list. Starting blank gives you one Final Inspection operation, which is enough for now.

2. Balloon the print

1. The wizard's ballooning step shows the drawing on its own, with the balloon tool already armed.
2. Choose what kind of characteristic you are about to place before you click: press 1 for a dimension, 2 for a thread, 3 for GD&T, 4 for basic, 5 for finish, 6 for a note. Shift plus the mouse wheel cycles the same list, and a pill beside the cursor shows what is armed.
3. Click the feature on the print. The balloon lands and its row is created at the same moment.
4. Place three to get the feel of it. A dimension, a thread and a note cover most of the shapes.
5. Labels are plain sequential numbers, assigned in the order you place them.

3. Build the routing

1. Open the Process tab and add the operations in the order the part travels, for example Turn, Grind, Plate, Final Inspection.
2. Give each one a step number, a name and a type.
3. Tick the box asking whether the operation changes part dimensions on Grind and on Plate. Leave it clear on Turn and on Final Inspection.
4. On Plate, enter the coat thickness as a per-side range, for example 0.0002 to 0.0004. On Grind, enter the stock removed, for example 0.0100 to 0.0100.
5. Back in the Power Editor, click a dimension's Ops cell. For each operation, say whether the characteristic is inspected there, whether that operation makes it grow or shrink, and whether the effect lands on one side or both.

4. Read the walk-back

Type the finished-part limits once, at the final inspection. Open the Control Plan tab and step through the operation tabs: every station upstream now carries limits of its own, worked backward through everything that happens to the part after it.

Values in blue were computed. Hover one to see the whole chain that produced it. Values in red with an exclamation mark mean the process window is wider than the tolerance it has to fit inside, and no size the machinist can leave will survive it.

• How the walk-back works, with the arithmetic

5. Print it

1. On the Control Plan tab, pick the operation you want and press Print.
2. The sheet is Letter landscape, with the characteristics inspected at that operation and five blank rows for the operator.
3. Choose Save as PDF in the print dialog to file a controlled copy in your QMS.

6. Save the file

Press Ctrl+S, or Cmd+S on a Mac. ctrlPlanner writes a .cplan.zip to your computer holding the plan, the drawings and everything derived from them. There is no server copy, because there is no server: that file is the record, and it is yours.

• Next: plans are files on your computer
• Ballooning in detail