At 7:40 on a Tuesday, the production manager of a 60-person precision machining shop opened the plan for the day and found that the first three jobs couldn’t start. The steel for job 1187 had never been ordered, because the person who estimated the requirement assumed someone else had. The fixture for job 1189 was in a workshop across town, borrowed a month earlier and never logged. And the 400 finished brackets from last Friday were sitting somewhere in the yard, but no one could point to which pallet — while a customer was waiting to collect them.
The morning that made them pick up the phone
This wasn’t a one-off. Over the previous year, 31% of their jobs had shipped late, yet the order book looked healthy. The problem wasn’t the machines or the workforce; the shop floor and the planning board simply told two different stories. When the ERPNext Consulting team spent its first two days watching instead of configuring, they found 39 unlabeled bins, three “temporary” storage spots that had lasted two years, and a rework pile nobody counted as inventory.
That last detail mattered most. Scrap and rework only become visible when you decide to count them. For a shop quoting with margins of 8–12%, hidden rework is the difference between a profitable month and a mystery loss.
Three changes that did the heavy lifting
The owner expected a grand software project. Instead, ERPNext Consulting set ground rules that sound almost boring:
- Every shelf, pallet and tray got a location code, glued to the edge of the bin where the forklift driver could read it without stopping.
- Stock must be moved in the system on the same shift it physically moves. The old “we’ll type it all in on Friday” habit was banned.
- Purchase orders for materials could only come from open production jobs, not from the famous “we’d better order some just in case” reflex.
That last rule hurt at first. It forced the owner to admit that nearly one-fifth of his raw material dollars had been sitting in stock for over 200 days without touching a machine.
The numbers after 90 days
Late shipments fell from 31% to 11% in one quarter. The goods-in team stopped doing double counting work, because materials were no longer buried under tarpaulins and rediscovered weeks later. The daily flood of “emergency purchase” requests dropped from eight to one or two.
The best result has no dashboard. Schedulers now plan against actual stock instead of what they hope is there. The discipline of writing down movements on the day they happen is worth more than any fancy report. If your team can’t trust the numbers on a screen, fix the bins before you fix the screens.