A 45-person cabinet maker came to us with a clean theory. Orders were 30 percent late, so the schedule must be broken. They wanted a better plan, a better board, a better way to slot jobs into the week.
Before touching the schedule, the ERPNext Consulting team spent two days on the shop floor with a clipboard, writing down what each job actually consumed. The schedule was fine. What we found instead was that no two people built the same cabinet the same way.
Same product, different parts, every single time
This company made 14 cabinet families with maybe 200 variations. On paper, each had a defined parts-and-steps list. In practice, those lists had been written years ago and never updated after the designs changed.
So the crews improvised. One team cut shelves at 24 inches, another at 23 and three-quarters, because the hardware on hand that month was a different brand. Purchasing bought to whatever the last shortage reminded them of, not to what the next two weeks of orders needed.
- Scrap and offcuts ran at 11 percent of material cost, against a 4 percent target.
- Production staff spent an estimated 6 hours a week hunting for parts that should have been kitted on a cart.
- Three customer disputes a month came from dimensions that did not match the original quote drawing.
Rebuilding a build list people actually trust
We did not rewrite 200 documents in a back office. We rebuilt 14, one per family, with the people who make them.
- Pick one cabinet family. Have the lead builder assemble one unit and record every part and every step as they go, including the small stuff nobody writes down.
- Compare that record against the current drawing, the quote, and the last three jobs of that family. Every difference gets a decision, not a compromise.
- Attach a photo of the finished assembly and a photo of the kitted cart for that family. New hires follow pictures faster than documents.
- Lock the parts list so purchasing can plan from real demand, and update it the day a design changes — not at the end of the year.
The result that surprised everyone
Six months in, material scrap fell from 11 percent to 5 percent. On-time delivery went from 70 percent to 92 percent, and overtime dropped by nearly a third, with no change at all to how jobs were scheduled.
The general manager’s comment stuck with me after the ERPNext Consulting engagement ended: the schedule was only ever as good as the recipe behind it. Seven months earlier, his team was ready to buy a new planning tool.
Start with the product family that causes the most arguments on the floor. Build one unit with your best builder and write down everything. That single afternoon will tell you more than a month of meetings.