Answering where an order is without walking the floor
A buyer asks where the order stands, and the honest answer lives on a traveller signed days behind the floor. Propagating operation completions into a status a customer can be given closes that loop, but only as good as its weakest input: machine monitoring sees spindle hours and never sees the part sitting in deburr, so the answer needs both the feed and the human confirmation at the last signed operation. What reaches the buyer is a dated statement of what has run and what remains, which beats walking the floor every time the phone rings.
The quote was built against one revision and the drawing in the operator hand is another, which is the defect this sector is built around.
A request to quote arrives as an archive of geometry files and drawings, or as a line in a customer portal, or as a scan. An estimator opens each one, decomposes the part into operations mentally, estimates setup and run times, and emails suppliers for material pricing before typing a number into a spreadsheet.
- MachineMetrics
- JobBOSS2
When this is the wrong thing to build
Pick something else if time is keyed in the next morning. The status will be a day stale no matter how it is presented.
The constraint that shapes it
Quality certification is the constraint that shapes everything here. More on how this sector works.
One change of state, written everywhere it belongs, once. Read what this shape is, or start from one of these.
- Keeping a status change from being typed four times
- Closing a matter in every system that still holds it
- Retiring old equipment from every record naming it
- Writing one client change into every system that holds it
- Writing one staffing change into every system that grants access
- Keeping an endorsement change from being typed twice
- How do I answer where is my order without walking the shop floor?
- Why is the last signed operation on the traveller days behind?
- Can a customer see job progress without calling the office?
- How do I get shop floor data current enough to report status?
- What does a job status update need to say to a buyer?
Back to manufacturing, or see how this is priced and scoped.