Where Is the Product Now: Production Order Tracking Without Status Meetings

Production order tracking means that three things are known about every product: which stage it is at, what its status is and whether it is on plan. In Bimp this data comes from the production task for each product, and the totals “ordered - produced - remaining” are shown by the Production Progress report.

A production manager gathers the foremen every morning to find out where the batch of cabinets for a dealer is. That takes twenty minutes of talking, and by lunch part of the answers is already out of date. Below is one end-to-end hypothetical example: a batch of 40 cabinets across four stages, a status table, a count and a list of what is late. The company is hypothetical.

How do you find out which stage a product is at without a meeting?

Each product has its own production task (PT): a document for one product with one series, which passes through the stages of the specification. Every stage has a responsible person and a status. When a foreman changes a status, Bimp records the time, and the production manager sees it in the journal without phone calls.

The journal opens in “Production → Production task”. Tasks are grouped by source documents: by customer orders (with the number, priority and number of series in progress) and by “Order for free stock”. There are search and filters by dates, statuses, stages, responsible persons and orders. Completed tasks are hidden, and the “Completed orders” switch brings them back.

What should you set up so stages are visible?

Before the first order, prepare the catalogs and the specification:

In the example, the “3-drawer cabinet” specification has four stages: cutting, edging, assembly, packing. For statuses it is useful to create your own “Waiting for materials” and set colors: in a journal with hundreds of rows, color separates work from idle time faster than words. A new status is created inactive, so turn on “Active” and “Use for the Production task document”, otherwise it will not appear in the list.

The batch is split into individual products. In the production order click “Create batches”, and the products become rows of 1 pc with their own batches and series. Then “Create based on → Production task”. For 40 cabinets Bimp creates 40 tasks, one per series. Setup and steps are covered in more detail in the article Production tasks.

What does the status table of a 40-product batch look like?

On the morning of Nov 21 the batch stands as follows. The stage a product is at is the first stage without the “Completed” status.

Counting by stage. Cutting: 7. Edging: 5 + 4 = 9. Assembly: 4 + 2 + 4 = 10. Packing: 2 + 2 = 4. Finished: 10. The sum 7 + 9 + 10 + 4 + 10 = 40, so every product is accounted for.

Percentages: ready 10 / 40 = 25%, and 30 products are in progress at the stages, which is 75%. 33 products have passed cutting (9 + 10 + 4 + 10 = 33), and 7 stand at the first stage: there was not enough board, and the “Waiting for materials” status sits there. Where exactly 7 comes from is explained in the article on the production order: chipboard was enough for 33 cabinets, and for 7 it was short by 12 m².

How do you count what is late?

Lateness needs deadlines. The planned start and finish date is set in the production order and in the production task, and per-stage deadlines are set as the shop’s internal schedule. In the example it is: cutting by Nov 19, edging by Nov 20, assembly by Nov 23, packing by Nov 24. Bimp records the actual start and finish of a stage itself, when a status becomes a stage start or finish.

Compare the schedule with the table on Nov 21:

The delay at cutting is 21 - 19 = 2 days, at edging 21 - 20 = 1 day. The late products are 7 + 9 = 16, which is 16 / 40 = 40% of the batch. There is also a second check. By the schedule, on Nov 21 all 40 products should already have passed cutting and edging, and assembly and later stages hold 10 + 4 + 10 = 24 products. The difference 40 - 24 = 16 matches the lateness.

The two production tasks on “Paused” in assembly have not yet broken their deadline, but they are worth opening first: a pause keeps materials reserved and does not move the product on. The reason shows in the history of status changes on the task card, with time and author.

What does the Production Progress report show?

The journal answers the question “where is the product”, and the report answers “how many in total”. For each production order it collects the columns “Ordered”, “Produced”, “Remaining” and “Shipped”. “Produced” comes from posted assemblies: when a PT gets the “Product” status, Bimp creates an assembly of the finished product.

For the batch with the statuses above, the report on Nov 21 would show these figures.

Remaining is 40 - 10 = 30, and this is the sum of products at all unfinished stages (7 + 9 + 10 + 4 = 30). From this report the manager tells the dealer that ten cabinets are ready to ship and thirty more are in progress, and names a date that allows for the delay. Descriptions of filters and groupings are in the article Production Progress. For production to customer orders the report has a separate switch that cuts off the shop’s internal needs.

What should you do next with the late items?

Each group of late items has its own action, and the numbers in the table suggest the priority. Seven products at cutting are waiting for board: 7 × 1.8 = 12.6 m² is needed, and allowing for a 0.6 m² remainder, 12 m² has to be purchased. While the board is on its way the shop keeps working, because the nine products at edging and ten at assembly give it a workload.

The nine products at edging are one day behind. This is a staffing question: if one more worker is moved to the stage, the lag shrinks. The production manager opens assembly with its two paused tasks first, because it comes after the late stages, and every idle day there pushes back shipment for the whole batch. The conclusion comes from two rows of the journal and one row of the report, without gathering people in one room.

How do you run daily tracking in ten minutes?

The routine has four steps:

1. Open the journal and filter tasks with the statuses “Waiting for materials” and “Paused”. This is the list of stoppages, each with a reason and a responsible person.
2. Filter by the stage that should already have finished by the schedule. In the example that is cutting and edging: 16 products.
3. Open the Production Progress report and reconcile “Remaining” with what has been promised to the customer.
4. Save these settings as a report template so tomorrow you open it with one click.

After that the meeting is about decisions: buy more board, move two people to edging, push the shipment date. Collecting statuses disappears from it. A similar walk-through on another product, with semi-finished goods and replacement of scrap, is in the demo case on tracking production by stage.

What Bimp does and does not do

Bimp is a Ukrainian cloud ERP for manufacturers, and a production task in it carries a product through the stages of the specification. The system records the responsible person and the status of every stage, the start and finish time, the change history, and on the “Completed” or “Semi-finished” status it accrues piecework pay and creates an assembly. The journal gives filters by stage, status and responsible person, and the report shows ordered, produced, remaining and shipped. A general overview of the capabilities is on the Bimp site.

The limits are these. The journal and the report show the state, while deadlines per stage and the fact of a stoppage are compared by a person: there is no separate “Late” column, and its role is played by comparing the schedule with the current stage, while your own statuses such as “Waiting for materials” give a clear reason. The Production Progress report counts products and does not break them down by stage, so stages are viewed in the journal. A worker changes the status, and if the shop does not mark stages on time, the journal lags behind reality. A production task cannot be deleted, only cancelled, so create tasks only for the rows you need.

In the example of 40 products, tracking comes down to four numbers: 10 finished, 30 in progress, 16 late, 7 of them waiting for materials. These are the numbers the production manager sees in the morning without a single phone call.

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