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Leaking time and spotting the disconnections
Ask most Operations Managers whether their business is efficient, and you'll probably get a reasonably confident yes after all, they are profitable and a going concern, right? Ask them to walk you through exactly what happens to a job between the customer's order landing and the invoice going out, and the confidence might tend to wobble a little and not because the process is badly designed but because generally nobody has actually mapped it end to end in a long time, and the gaps have grown up quietly around whatever workaround felt reasonable at the time.
This article is that walkthrough. I’ll follow an order through a typical manufacturing SME, stage by stage, and flag exactly where information usually gets stuck and hopefully by the end, you should be able to hold this up against your own process and spot your own potential weak points.
The journey, stage by stage
Enquiry and quote. A quote goes out (sometimes put together in Word or Excel) and is probably emailed as a PDF. There's a challenge around keeping a central record of what was quoted, when, or whether it was ever followed up. Sometimes it’s stored in a folder on a server, sometimes in a standalone app but rarely in a place where those who need to can see it so, should the customer come back three weeks later, someone must dig through an inbox or folder to find the original figures.- Order confirmation. The customer's purchase order arrives, by email, through a portal, or occasionally still by fax. Somebody re-keys the details into the ERP or job system to create a works order. This is the first rekeying point in the journey and the first place a transposed quantity or missed spec line can enter the process.
- Works order issued to the floor. A paper traveller is printed and follows the physical job around the shop floor. Operators write notes on it, sign it off at each stage, and it accumulates handwriting that's genuinely valuable, but that information only exists on that one piece of paper until someone manually transcribes it back into a system, often days later, if at all.
- Goods-in and supplier quality checks. A delivery arrives with a delivery note and, for many manufacturers, a certificate of conformity or material certificate. These get scanned, filed, or occasionally just kept in a drawer "for now" - usually with no direct link back to the specific job or batch they belong to. This is the point that causes real pain later, when a customer or auditor asks for full batch traceability and someone must reconstruct it from memory and a filing cabinet.
- Production and quality inspection. Inspection results get recorded on paper in the QA office. They're accurate, but they're invisible to anyone outside that room until someone physically walks the sheet over or types it up — which means operations, sales, and the customer are all working from information that's already out of date.
- Dispatch. A packing note is generated, sometimes ahead of a last-minute change to what's shipped. Mismatches here are a common source of customer complaints — and they're almost always a symptom of the paperwork lagging the physical reality, not a picking error.
- Invoice. Finance waits for paperwork to make its way back from the shop floor before an invoice can go out which ties this stage directly back to the working capital cost we've covered before. The job might be finished and shipped, but if the signed-off traveller is still sitting in a tray somewhere, the invoice isn't going anywhere either.
Draw your own connection map
Here's a genuinely useful exercise, and it takes about twenty minutes: sketch your own version of the journey above as a simple row of boxes, one per stage, exactly as it happens in your business today (not how it's supposed to happen on paper).
For each box, ask three questions:
Does information get rekeyed here, rather than flowing through automatically?- Does wait somewhere for longer than it needs to - an inbox, a tray, someone's desk?
- Does anything important exist only on paper, in only one place?
Mark each box that fails one of those tests. Most manufacturing SMEs find three, four, sometimes five weak points scattered across a process they'd have described as "basically fine" five minutes earlier and that's not a criticism, it's just what happens when a process grows organically rather than being designed.
Why manufacturing has it harder than most sectors
Office-based service businesses have their own version of this problem, but manufacturing carries some extra weight: certificates of conformity and material traceability for regulated or safety-critical parts, ISO 9001 document control requirements that expect you to prove not just what happened but when and by whom, and health & safety sign-offs that need to be retrievable instantly if something goes wrong, not reconstructed after the fact.
This is usually where document workflows earn their place in the conversation and not as a replacement for your ERP or production system, but as the layer that makes sure the right certificate, sign-off or inspection record is captured once, indexed against the right job or batch automatically, and instantly retrievable by anyone who's authorised to see it without creating extra work for the shop floor to achieve it.
Where we go next
Now, once you've mapped your own weak points, the natural next question is what fixes them and the honest answer is that it starts with getting a handle on the documents themselves. In the next article, I’ll look at document management properly: not as filing, but as the foundation layer that makes everything else in this series possible and, the best software to make that happen.
Interested in finding out more about how to become a more connected as a company - book your free tickets now for our "The Connected Company" event at the Aura Centre in Hessle and, if you want to discuss the challenges you face, drop me an email: shaun@anota.co.uk.
Shaun Turner - Technical Director
