Industries · Manufacturing
Work in progress is the hardest thing to see and the most expensive thing to guess at. We build systems that show where the work actually is, and raise the exception as the threshold is crossed rather than in next month's report.
The flow
Before anything is designed we map this for your business specifically. The sequence below is the general shape of it — the version in your head, written down, is where a build actually starts.
A customer order or a forecast becomes demand that has to be met by a date.
Demand becomes a work order with a routing — the ordered operations required to produce it.
Work is released to the floor against machine and labour capacity that is already partly committed.
Material moves between operations. Between scans, its true location and state are an assumption.
Inspection passes, fails, or puts the lot on hold — and a hold has to stop downstream work, not just be recorded.
Completed, stocked, picked and shipped, with the paperwork the customer requires.
Where it breaks
These are the patterns we see repeatedly in this work. We have not measured your operation, so there is no percentage attached to any of them — that number would be made up, and you would be right not to trust it.
5 failures across the 6 steps above — and 3 steps that hold fine without a system. Select a step to isolate it.
What we build
Every capability below is something we have shipped, not something we could imagine shipping.
Throughput, cycle time and queue depth per operation, showing where work is genuinely piling up rather than where it averaged out.
When a queue, a cycle time or a margin crosses a limit you set, it surfaces immediately — as an item to act on, not a row in a monthly export.
Queue depth per operation rather than an average across the plant, with exceptions raised as thresholds are crossed instead of appearing in a monthly report.
A hold stops downstream operations from consuming the lot. The blocked path is built and verified, because a hold that only records itself is not a hold.
A quality hold that actually blocks. Two downstream attempts were refused and logged — a hold that only records itself is not a hold.
Operations, sequences and capacity modelled as they are, including the rework loops that exist but are rarely written down.
A work order across its routing. Weld is the constraint, not Form — and the queue there grew for three shifts before it crossed the threshold.
Limits, rules and recipients live in Settings and are read live, so a supervisor changes them rather than filing a ticket.
A supervisor lowering a threshold, not filing a ticket. The note is the argument: at 25 the same queue would have surfaced three shifts earlier than the old limit of 40 allowed.
Rates, labels and tracking attached to the order they belong to, rather than living in a separate shipping tool.
Shipping a finished work order with the certificates the customer's receiving dock requires. Every document is filed against the lot, so a recall traces from a heat number to a customer in one query.
Purpose-built demos, not client screenshots. Our clients haven't given permission to be named, so the companies, people and figures shown are invented. The capabilities are not.
These are systems we have actually connected in client builds. Anything with a documented API is workable — these are the ones already done.
QuickBooks
Costing and invoicing driven by what was actually produced.
Unishipper
Rate shopping, labels and tracking against the order.
Google Drive
Certificates, inspection records and spec documents filed against the lot.
Email & SMS
Exception and hold notifications to the people who can act on them.
A short call, no deck. We ask how the work moves through your business today and where it stalls, then send a written scope and a fixed price before anything is built. If we are not the right fit, we will say so on that call.