Every factory can tell you what it planned to make. Fewer can tell you, right now, what is finished, what is running, and what is waiting — without someone walking the floor to find out.
The gap between the plan and the update
Progress is usually captured at the end of a shift, or a day, or when a supervisor gets to it. That delay is where the useful information goes. By the time a delay is recorded, the decision it should have informed has already been made.
What to track per stage
- Which batch is at which process, not just which order is open
- Quantity completed, rejected and reworked at each stage
- The employee or machine the stage ran on
- Time in stage, so a bottleneck shows as a pattern rather than an anecdote
Tracked per stage, a delay stops being a single late order and becomes a visible constraint: one process, consistently over its expected time, holding everything behind it.
Rejections belong in the same record
When rejections are recorded separately from progress, yield becomes a monthly reconciliation instead of an operational number. Captured at the stage that produced them, they tell you where quality is actually being lost, while there is still time to act.
The test
Ask what a supervisor has to do to answer “where is this order?” If the answer involves walking somewhere or calling someone, the tracking is documenting the past rather than describing the present.
