The works order reaches the floor as a printout from an email
In most plants we have looked at, production itself runs well.
What comes apart is the information about it — between sales, planning, the warehouse and whatever is actually standing at the machine.
What usually breaks
- Stock is only true once a day
After the morning count everything reconciles.
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By noon a salesperson has sold from stock that is already reserved and production has drawn material nobody wrote off. Decisions made in the afternoon rest on a number that is eight hours old.
- The schedule lives in one person's spreadsheet
The production plan is known to the planner and their file.
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When a customer asks for a date, the answer requires a call to that one person, and their holiday stops the whole company from committing to dates.
- Nobody knows what an order really costs
Material is counted; machine time, changeovers and scrap are not.
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Margin on a job is known after the fact and only roughly, so the next quote rests on instinct.
- An off-the-shelf ERP forces the process to change
Rolling out a boxed system usually ends with the plant adapting to the module rather than the other way round.
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The exceptions your advantage rests on — unusual changeovers, working to two standards, subcontracting — don't fit a standard form.
What we do about it
- One place where the stock level is now
Reservations, issues and receipts recorded at the moment they happen, not during an evening of retyping.
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Sales sees what the warehouse sees, at the same hour.
- A schedule that opens without the planner
An order plan with workstation loading, available to sales and to shift leaders.
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A customer date comes from the plan rather than from a phone call.
- The real cost of a job
Time and consumption recorded at the workstation — by barcode or a simple panel, not a twenty-field form.
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Margin calculated from data that is being produced anyway.
- The process described, not replaced
We start by mapping how you work today, exceptions included.
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The system is there to take the manual retyping out of it, not to force the plant to work to somebody else's diagram.
In depth
Where we start
With the one process that costs the most hours — not with mapping the whole plant. Usually that is the order flow or material accounting; usually it also turns out that the data needed to improve it already exists, and simply lands in a spreadsheet instead of a system.
The discovery workshop ends with a list of exceptions nobody had written down before. That list is the main reason manufacturing quotes differ so widely between vendors.
What we don't promise
We don't promise the system will replace the planner. A good tool shortens their work and stops their knowledge being the only copy — but the decision about job sequence stays with the person who knows the machines.
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Questions from this industry
We already have an ERP. Does it need replacing?
Usually not. It is more often worth building what it lacks — a shop floor panel, planning, reporting — and integrating it with what already runs. We advise against replacing an ERP wherever it can be avoided: it is the most expensive and most dangerous project a plant can take on.
Can this be rolled out without stopping production?
Yes, and it is the only way we do it. Rollout goes module by module, alongside the existing way of working, with one workstation or one line as the pilot. Switching a whole plant over in a single weekend is the scenario where a fault stops production.
Will the people on the floor actually use it?
That is a real project risk, not a detail. A workstation panel has to be usable in gloves, in two taps, without logging in every time. We design it with the people who will stand at it, not only with management.
Got an idea? Let's talk.
The first call is free. We reply within one business day.