Production and warehouse in a spreadsheet: when to move to your own system

Where the spreadsheet stops keeping up

Planning production in a spreadsheet works while one person changes the plan and there are a few changes a week. With a dozen people on the floor and several jobs a day, changes are constant. A customer moves a deadline, a machine stops, material has not arrived. The spreadsheet shows the morning plan, and the floor works to what the foreman said.

Stock levels are similar. The spreadsheet says 40 units. The shelf holds 28, because two jobs used material and nobody booked it out. You find out when a job is due to start and the material is not there.

Signs I hear from manufacturing companies:

• The production manager spends the first hour of the day working out what is really in progress.
• Stocktakes show differences nobody can explain.
• A salesperson promises a date without knowing how many jobs are ahead of the new one.
• The same material gets ordered twice, or not at all.
• A job “disappeared” between the planning spreadsheet and the dispatch spreadsheet.

What a production and warehouse system looks like

The system is made of modules, meaning self-contained parts that can go live one after another. For production and warehouse I usually build these:

Production jobs

Each job has its items, bill of materials, sequence of operations and deadline. You see what stage it is at, who is working on it and whether it is late. A job is created from a customer order or from a plan for stock.

Plan and queue

The list of jobs in the order they go onto machines or workstations. Moving one job moves the rest and immediately shows which deadlines are at risk. Sales sees this queue before promising a date.

Shop-floor screen

A tablet at the workstation. The worker sees their jobs, starts an operation, finishes it, reports a problem or a missing material. Nobody walks to the office with a piece of paper. The screen has large buttons and shows only what is needed at that spot.

Stock levels

Receipts, issues, reservations against jobs. The stock level is calculated from movements, not from a manual entry. The system shows what will run out for next week’s jobs and lets you order material from the same screen.

Reports

Workstation load, overdue jobs, material use per job, stocktake differences. You open it and see it, without asking for a summary. Everything can be exported to a spreadsheet for a meeting.

What about the stock program you already have

Many companies have a stock program bundled with their accounting software. It does not have to go. A custom system can take over production and planning and exchange data with the stock program: pull stock levels and send back consumption. Accounting keeps seeing what it always has, and the shop floor gets screens the ready-made program never had.

We decide what to replace and what to connect on the first call, once you show me how you work. Sometimes I say that buying an add-on module for your current program is enough. I would rather say that than build something you already have.

How the rollout goes

The first module, most often production jobs, usually arrives after the first month. The floor runs it alongside the spreadsheet for a week or two, until the team trusts the new screen. Then the spreadsheet stays as an archive. Further modules follow in stages, and the company does not stop for a single day.

I move data about materials, products and stock levels out of the spreadsheets before launch. That is described on the page about moving data out of spreadsheets. How the system handles customer orders themselves is on the page about orders and jobs, and the bigger picture is on the main page of the guide.

Describe in the form below how you plan production and run the warehouse today. I will get back to you.