Solutions · Manufacturing
The office around a workshop.
The office around a workshop: material in, stock by godown and batch, staff and payroll, and finished goods out against an order. Everything here sits on one side of a line. What crosses the workshop door in either direction is recorded — material in against the supplier it came from, finished goods out against an order, and the people whose hours are being kept whether or not anybody is writing them down. What happens inside the workshop is yours, and this page is going to be specific about that.
There is no bill of materials here, no production order, and nothing that costs a run. If that is what you are looking for, the section below says so plainly rather than making you find out in month three.
The order it goes in
What has to be in before the racks can be trusted
A workshop’s move is a stock move. The office paperwork is the easy half; the hard half is that a figure on a screen is only worth having if every movement behind it was written down as it happened.
One catalogue, holding both kinds of thing
What you buy and what you make are both items, told apart by your own categories and brands. That surprises people, and it is what lets one godown hold both and one movement ledger explain both.
Until this is in, there is nothing for a stock document to move.
The suppliers, and which items really come from them
An item is linked to the vendors who actually supply it rather than to a memory of who was cheapest last time. Do it while the items are being entered; doing it afterwards means opening every item a second time.
Until this is in, material arriving has nowhere to have arrived from.
The godowns, and batches where the trade needs them
Stock per item and per variant, per place, with batches where you have to be able to say which one a thing came out of. Not every workshop needs batches — the ones that do need them from the first day, because a batch nobody recorded when the material came in is not something anybody reconstructs in month three.
Until this is in, the answer to “what is on the racks” is a walk.
The staff register
One list of people, with attendance and the salary side both working from it rather than from a muster book that has to be argued with the office copy at the end of every month. Shifts, week-offs, holidays and leave requests sit on the same list.
Worth doing before a month ends rather than after one.
Then what goes out
Orders carrying their stages and their shipments, and the bill against the order. This is the part that runs itself once everything above it is true.
The easiest part of the move, and the part every demonstration starts with.
One day, and where it lands
Everything the office records, and the door it stops at
Read this as a boundary as much as a map. Each moment on the left either crosses the workshop door or happens beside it, and the records on the right are all there are.
The absence in the middle is the honest part of this page. What a run consumed, what it ought to have consumed, and what it cost to make are not on that drawing because they are not in this system.
The edge of it, said plainly
Where the workshop stops and the office starts
Somebody will show you production planning. It will not be us, because we do not have it.
There is no bill of materials here. Nothing holds a recipe for a finished thing, so nothing can tell you what a run should have consumed or flag the run that consumed more. There is no production order to release, no work in progress for a part-made thing to sit in, and no costing of a batch.
What there is, is the paperwork on either side of the floor, and on that side it is complete. Material taken in against the supplier it came from. Stock held per godown and per batch and moved only by documents. Finished goods leaving against an order somebody in the office is already chasing. One register of the people who worked, which the attendance side and the salary side both read.
The reason to put this on the page rather than into a meeting is that nearly every question a workshop office is actually asked in a week sits on our side of that line: what is on the racks, which batch that came out of, has that order gone, what came in from that supplier, who was in on Tuesday. A system that answers those and admits it cannot plan a run is worth more than one that claims both.
What a workshop asks first
Three questions, and one of the answers is no
These are the questions that decide whether this is the right thing for you, so they are answered here rather than on a call where only one of us is in the room.
- Can it tell me what a run should have consumed?
- No. Nothing here holds a recipe for a finished thing, so nothing can compare what went in against what ought to have. What it can tell you, down to the document, is what came in, what is on the racks now, and what has left.
- Which batch did that come out of?
- That one it answers, as long as the batch was recorded when the material was taken in. Stock is held per batch as well as per item and per godown, and every movement is a document — so tracing it back is reading rather than reconstructing.
- The people who worked it — are they in a second book?
- They are on one staff register, which the attendance side and the salary side both work from. Shifts, week-offs, holidays and leave requests sit on it too, so the argument at the end of the month between the muster book and the office copy no longer has two sides to take.
Tell us what crosses your door.
What arrives, what leaves, who is on the floor, and which of it is currently kept on paper. We will say what we would switch on — and we will say plainly which of your questions this does not answer.
Every trade, side by side →Parts of the office →What it does →Plans & pricing →