From accepted order to signed delivery note, and a stock count that balances

Answering “where is my order?” required walking the floor. The works order travelled with the job as a printed pack, and its position was known only to the person standing next to it, so sales gave customers estimates and the estimates were often wrong.

Quality control happened at the end, which meant a defect introduced at operation two was discovered after operations three through seven had already been paid for. Rework was absorbed silently and never costed. Stock was counted once a year over a shutdown; the variance was large, unexplained and written off, and for the rest of the year the system balance was a number nobody trusted enough to plan against.

An accepted order releases a works order with a routing, and operators book on and off each operation at their station, so the board shows every live order, the operation it is sitting at and how long it has been there.

Quality gates sit at the operations where defects are actually introduced rather than only at the end, and a gate can hold the job, reject it, or route it to a rework loop — and the rework carries its own labour booking, so the cost of getting it wrong lands on the order instead of disappearing into overhead. Despatch produces the delivery note and captures proof of delivery on the driver's device. Stock moved from an annual shutdown to continuous cycle counting, with high-value and fast-moving lines counted against a scanned count sheet and material variances raised as an investigation with an owner.