Where jobs get lost
- At the counter. The order is taken by phone or WhatsApp and written down somewhere only one person checks.
- On the floor. The job card is on paper, so the office has to walk out and ask where it is.
- At the end. The work is finished, but nobody tells the customer, or the delivery isn’t arranged, so it sits.
- In the money. The deposit or the final payment is tracked in a different place, so nobody knows what’s owed.
Four rules that fix most of it
- One job, one number, one place. Every job gets a number the moment it’s confirmed, and everything about it lives on that one record: customer, items, due date, payment and delivery.
- A small set of clear stages, the same for every job: for example Requested, Registered, In production, Ready, Delivered. If a stage needs explaining, it’s too vague.
- The floor updates the job, not the office. Whoever does the work marks it done. That’s what keeps the stage true without anyone chasing.
- A due date on every job, and a list of what’s overdue, looked at every morning.
Job cards and work orders
A big job is often several pieces of work: cutting, welding, powder coating. Splitting the job into work orders, one per piece of work, lets each team see only what’s theirs and lets the office see exactly what’s holding the job up. When every work order is complete, the job is ready.
Checking materials when the work order is issued, rather than when someone goes to the shelf, catches the missing plate before the job stops.
Whiteboard, spreadsheet or software?
A whiteboard is visible but disappears when it’s wiped, and can’t be seen from the office or the road. A spreadsheet holds more, but it’s only as current as the last person who updated it, and two people can’t safely edit it at once. Both work at five jobs a week. At fifty, the gaps start costing you.
Job tracking software keeps the board’s visibility and adds what it can’t do: history, payments, delivery records, and a link the customer can check instead of phoning.
Keeping the customer informed
“Is it ready yet?” calls take time on both sides. Sending the customer a tracking link when the job is registered, showing its stage and how far along production is, stops most of them. They see the same truth you do.
How Fabristack does it
In Fabristack’s Order Management every job is one order, with its line items, VAT, due date and payments. Work orders send it to production, and the stage moves itself as work orders and handovers are completed. The order list shows what’s overdue and what’s ready for delivery at the top, and each order has a tracking link and email for the customer.