I’ve sat in production meetings at twelve manufacturers over the past two years, from 60-person machine shops to a 400-person food plant. Eleven of them could tell me exactly what came off the floor last month. Not one could tell me what would come off the floor next Thursday if a big order moved.
That blind spot is what most ERPNext Consulting work in manufacturing really attacks, whatever the project documents call it. Here’s what those twelve had in common, and the three numbers that told us whether the fix would stick.
The three numbers that predicted success
Before touching anything, we measured three things: how many open work orders were already past their promised date, how often the schedule changed within 48 hours of a job starting, and how many jobs started without all materials on hand.
At the food plant, the first number was 31%, the schedule changed nine times a day, and four in ten jobs started short of materials. At the machine shop that later ran the smoothest, those same numbers were 8%, two changes a day, and one job in twenty. The difference wasn’t discipline. It was whether the schedule lived in one place.
Why the plan breaks at around 80 open orders a month
Below that, one experienced planner holds the whole schedule in their head and reshuffles it when a machine goes down. Above it, the plan lives in three places at once: a whiteboard, a spreadsheet, and the planner’s memory. Each of them is right about different things.
The symptom managers notice first isn’t late delivery. It’s that quoting gets slow and cautious, because nobody wants to promise a date they can’t see clearly.
What actually changed in four weeks
- Every job got one start date and one finish date, editable by both the planner and the floor supervisor — with one named owner per change.
- Material availability was checked at the moment a job was released, not the morning it was due to start.
- Machine hours per week were logged for four straight weeks, so capacity stopped being an opinion.
- Friday, 30 minutes: the coming week’s schedule reviewed with floor supervisors in the room, then frozen unless the plant manager initialed a change.
By week ten, the food plant’s late work orders sat at 11% and schedule changes were down to three a day. The planner, who had been working six days a week, went back to five. That’s usually the moment a team admits the change is real.
Write those three numbers down for your own plant this Friday. Whatever they come out to, they’re the baseline you’ll be judged against — and the only honest way to separate an ERPNext Consulting project from a software installation.