How to organise production orders without spreadsheets

The spreadsheet works until it doesn't. In a small workshop with two or three machines, a status column ("to do", "in production", "done") does the job. The trouble starts when several people update the same sheet, machines stand idle for maintenance nobody recorded, and parts come back without anyone knowing which order they were in.

Why the spreadsheet fails

It is not a lack of discipline in the people using it. A spreadsheet simply does not connect things to each other:

• It does not know that order PRD000214 uses the same machine as PRD000213, nor that this machine is overdue for maintenance
• It does not record material consumption per order, only what someone remembers to write down
• It cannot tell an OK part from a NOK one without an extra column that is rarely filled in on time
• It warns nobody about anything — you have to open the file to know where things stand

The typical result: asking "where is order X at?" means messaging someone who walks the shop floor to check by eye.

What a production order needs to hold

To stop depending on memory and messages, a production order needs to hold, at the very least:

1. Which order it belongs to — so you know when everything is ready to deliver
2. Which machine and who — to understand workloads and scheduling conflicts
3. Actual material consumption — not the planned amount, what was really used
4. Quality result — OK, NOK, and why, linked to the part and the machine
5. Machine status — whether maintenance is pending before starting another order

None of these points is hard to note down on its own. What is hard is keeping them all up to date and linked to each other without it becoming a job in itself.

How to organise without wasting time

Three habits help even before you change tools:

• One place per order. If the same production order appears in two sheets (one for production, one for quality), one of them will fall out of date.
• Record it on the spot, not at the end of the day. Material consumption and quality results noted hours later are approximations, not data.
• Link maintenance to production. A machine with a maintenance warning should block (or at least flag) new orders on it, not sit in a separate file that only maintenance sees.

When it is worth leaving the spreadsheet

If the answer to "where is this at?" still means asking someone, or if more than one sheet is trying to tell the same story, it is a sign that the spreadsheet is no longer helping — it is demanding extra work just to stay consistent.

You do not need to jump to a full ERP to fix this. You need one place where order, production, material, quality and maintenance are connected, without the complexity (or the cost) of implementing a system designed for factories with their own IT departments.

That is exactly what Kelo does: orders, production orders, quality and maintenance on one screen, built first for 3D print farms and industrial SMEs. Try it free for 3 months with the code PILOT100 — only 5 places available.