Nobody on the floor can say which job is running late until it already is.
A work order puts one job on the floor: what to make, how many, by when, and which stage it has reached. Material is issued against it, output and rejections are booked to it, and the person on the phone can see where a customer’s job stands. The whiteboard stops being the only version of the truth.
An order arrives on WhatsApp. The supervisor writes it in a diary, the whiteboard carries whatever fits, and by Wednesday the two disagree. A customer rings at four o’clock, and somebody walks to the machine to find out.
Each job gets a work order with a number of its own. Your stages sit on it in the order they actually happen, cutting, welding, coating, packing, and each is marked off as it finishes. What the store issued and what the floor produced are on the same screen.
What work order management does.
Raised from the confirmed order
Item, quantity and promised date carry over from the sales order or the customer’s purchase order. The specification is not retyped.
Your stages, in your words
Stage names are set once and used everywhere. A job shows where it is standing and who has it now.
Material issued to a number
The store issues against the work order, not to a person’s name. Issued quantity sits beside what the material list expected.
Output, rejection and rework
Pieces finished, pieces rejected and pieces sent back are booked to the job as they happen, not totalled on Saturday.
Labour against the job
Which fitter worked which stage, and for how long, where you pay by the piece or by the hour.
A board the counter can read
Jobs by stage, jobs held for material, jobs past the date you promised. Whoever answers the phone sees the same board.
The people who open this every day.
Production in-charge
Releases jobs, moves them between stages, and holds the ones waiting on material with a reason typed in.
Supervisor
Marks his stage done from a tablet near the machine.
Storekeeper
Issues material against the job number and sees what is still due to it.
Owner
Looks at what is late, and at what is late for the same reason every week.
It is one part of a system, not an island.
A module earns its place by what it passes to the next one. These are the connections we set up most often.
- Bill of materials
- Production planning
- Stock
- Job work challans
- Quality control
- Sales orders
How we would put it in.
Questions owners ask about work order management.
Our supervisor will not touch a computer. Then what?
Then he need not. Most shops keep one tablet at the store window, and either he marks the stage or the store clerk marks it while issuing material. If nobody on the floor touches a screen, the board runs a day behind, and it is fairer to say so now.
Is a whiteboard still enough?
For four or five jobs at a time, yes. It fails when jobs run into double figures, when two people promise dates to the same customer, or when nothing on the board explains why a job has not moved since Monday. Our free technology audit watches a week of your board and says which of those is you.
Can it take our sales orders from Tally?
Yes. Orders and item masters come across, and finished quantities can go back as stock entries. Your accountant keeps his ledgers where he likes them.
What about work we send outside?
That goes out as job work against the same order. Material leaving for galvanising is on a challan, and what has not returned stays visible against the job.
Businesses that ask for this.
Modules that work with it.
Tell us how you handle work order management today.
A spreadsheet, a register or another system: say which, and we will tell you plainly what is worth changing.
- No obligation
- We reply the same working day
- Your details stay private