Production work center (WC) activities are optional sub-sets of WC departments. Activities may be defined prior to establishing WCs, and then used as more detailed actions within a WC. Additionally, each of these activities may be assigned a separate hourly charge rate. Presently, you can still choose to setup activities if desired and then decide if you want to track production through activities or not. With the current activity setup, this decision is universally applied for all WCs and work orders.
Note: manex's new CUBE software has implemented optional routing steps in place of activities. With the optional routing steps, it still needs to be determined if activities are needed, but now you would be able to easily decide if you want to track production through those steps, and also makes for fewer places to maintain in your setup