Three departments, three versions of the same order
A make-to-order manufacturer operated with three distinct centres: administration and sales in the office, logistics for materials and finished goods, and a shop floor with several work lines. Each area had reasonable tools (a management system for orders and invoicing, tracking sheets in logistics, paper production reports), but no shared view, in time to be useful, of what happened between confirmation of the order and dispatch of the goods.
The processes had grown organically. When administration recorded an order, logistics did not always receive the same information. Planning worked from printed lists that sometimes missed changes agreed by phone. Returns were noted on paper and reached accounts days later. What failed was the connection between departments, not the individual effort of each manager.
The missing links between one shift and the next
The central problem was the manual steps that joined departments without common rules or a record made at the same time. An order changed in sales did not always reach the shop floor before the work order was started. Material used in the workshop did not show in stock until the end of the shift. A pick prepared in logistics could belong to an earlier version of the order. Each manual link (a call, an email, a note on paper) was a possible point of failure.
Nobody saw the same picture of the order
The shop floor could not reliably see which orders were stuck in administration or short of material. Logistics prepared dispatches without a clear view of which orders the workshop had finished. Administration promised lead times without knowing the current state of manufacturing. The errors were not always serious on their own, but repetition wore down trust inside the company and with customers who were starting to notice gaps between what had been promised and what was delivered.
Stoppages, rework and extra calls
Operators stopped lines for material that administration believed was reserved and that logistics had not released. Dispatches were late because the shop floor had not reported that the order was closed. Invoicing argued over quantities delivered, against figures the workshop had recorded differently. Each department repeated checks that a connected flow would have made unnecessary.
New customers meant more orders and more exceptions, but the manual way of passing information did not scale. Service measures (lead time, picking accuracy, consistency of the paperwork) improved slowly despite growing effort. That was a sign that the problem was structural, and not a lack of commitment from the team.
A single thread from the order to dispatch
The project was framed as connecting processes, not as replacing the management system outright. A single flow was defined from order confirmation through to dispatch, with shared statuses visible to administration, logistics and the shop floor, and with rules that kept a phase from moving on until the previous one was complete: material reserved before manufacturing is released, the order closed in the workshop before the shipment is prepared, and consumption recorded at the moment of use.
Terminals in logistics and digital job sheets on the shop floor
In logistics, picking terminals were introduced and linked to the same record that administration consulted. The shop floor received digital work orders carrying the current version of the order, and recorded progress and consumption from stations in the workshop. Exceptions went through defined flows, with an owner and a trace, in place of verbal agreements running alongside the system.
Once the new flow had settled, tracking errors between departments fell markedly. Sales looked at the same status as logistics and the shop floor, without intermediate calls to confirm what was already on the record. Time spent in alignment meetings dropped, because much of the information no longer had to be rebuilt by hand. Management gained useful measures: time from confirmation to dispatch, deviations by exception, and real bottlenecks in place of conflicting impressions.
