Moving production off spreadsheets: what manufacturers should track first
Trying to put the whole factory into software at once rarely works. Start with one question everyone asks every day: where is this order? Here is how to answer it without a phone call.
By KendratekPublished Updated 4 min read
Key points
- Don't start with every machine and material. Start with the order, from confirmation to dispatch.
- Agree a short list of stages, and one person responsible for each.
- Updates should take a few taps on a phone, right where the work happens.
- Add stock, quality and costing later, once people trust the basics.
In a lot of small and mid-sized factories, the real production system is an Excel sheet, a whiteboard on the shop floor and a WhatsApp group. And honestly, it works, because experienced people hold it all together.
Then orders grow. Or the one person who knows everything goes on leave. Or a customer asks a simple question, "Where's my order?", and it takes an hour and five phone calls to answer.
At that point it's tempting to look for one system that does everything: planning, stock, machines, quality, costing. Projects that big are hard to finish, and even harder to get people to use. There's a more reliable way, and it starts small.
Start with the order
Sales cares about the order. So do production, dispatch, accounts and the customer. Everyone in the business cares about it.
If you can reliably see, for every order, what stage it's at, who's handling it and when it's expected to be done, you've solved the problem people feel every single day. Everything else can be added on later.
Agree a short list of stages
Sit down with the people who handle orders and agree the steps an order goes through. Keep it short enough to fit on one screen. Something like this, adjusted to how you work:
- Order confirmed
- Materials checked or ordered
- Scheduled for production
- In production
- Quality check
- Packed and ready
- Dispatched
- Invoiced
For each stage, agree two things: who is responsible for it, and what has to be true before the order can move on. For example, "Quality check" only moves to "Packed" when the inspection report is signed. Getting this agreed matters more than any software. It turns "I think it's nearly done" into something anyone can check.
Make updating easy for the people doing the work
A tracking system is only as good as its updates. If a supervisor has to walk to the office computer and type a paragraph, updates will be late, and soon nobody will trust the system. So design it for the shop floor:
- Update from a phone or a shared tablet near the machines, in a few taps.
- Scan or pick the order from a list instead of typing order numbers.
- Fill in the obvious things automatically, like today's date and who's logged in, so people confirm rather than type.
- Use labels in the local language if that helps the team.
- Show each person "my work for today", not a list of every order in the factory.
Work out what managers want to know
Before anyone designs a report, write down the questions managers ask most. There are usually only a handful:
- Which orders are late, or about to be?
- Where is work stuck, and who is it waiting for?
- What's due to go out this week?
- What did we dispatch and invoice this month?
If one screen answers those, managers stop phoning the shop floor for updates, and the people on the floor stop being interrupted. That alone changes the working day.
Add more once people trust it
Once the team relies on order tracking, grow it in whatever direction matters most to you. Common next steps:
- Checking and reserving raw material against each order.
- Attaching quality records and test certificates to each batch.
- Working out the real cost of each job from time and material used.
- Creating dispatch documents straight from the order details.
- Linking to your accounting software so invoices aren't typed twice.
Each of these is easier because the order tracking is already there. And each can be done as a separate small step.
What about ready-made manufacturing software?
Sometimes a ready-made product is the right answer, especially if your process is fairly standard and you're happy to adapt to the software. Where these products struggle is with businesses that make to order, mix job work with their own products, or have a way of working that sets them apart. Then a simpler system built around how you actually work, linked to standard accounting software, is often much easier for people to adopt. Our guide on whether to buy software or get it built goes into this choice.
If your orders live in spreadsheets and WhatsApp today, tell us how they move. The first conversation is about your work, not about software.