Every Friday at 2pm, a 70-person metal fabricator held a meeting to decide what the factory would build the following week. It ran two hours. It usually ended with someone saying, “we’ll sort the rest out Monday.”
Which meant Monday started with another meeting, and the first shift often stood around waiting for instructions. The production manager estimated they lost four to six hours of machine time every Monday. That’s roughly 250 hours a year on the biggest machine alone.
Why the Friday meeting kept failing
Three things kept breaking it. First, nobody could see real capacity — the schedule lived in three spreadsheets and a whiteboard, and the whiteboard won arguments. Second, rush orders arrived constantly and jumped the queue without anyone removing what they displaced.
Third, machine breakdowns were handled by memory. When the press went down for a day, everyone improvised, and the plan was quietly abandoned by Wednesday.
None of that is a software problem, by the way. It’s a visibility problem with a software-shaped solution.
What replaced the two-hour meeting
The ERPNext Consulting team did something simple first: they built a single view showing every open job, the hours it needed per machine, and the delivery date. It took three weeks to get reliable, mostly because the shop floor data was being entered a day late.
Then came the rule that changed behaviour: a rush order must name the job it displaces. If a salesperson wants to jump the queue, they pick what gets pushed. No picking, no jumping.
Within a month, rush orders dropped by half. Not because customers changed — because salespeople started asking whether the rush was worth pushing out a delivery they’d already promised.
- Job status updated by the machine operator at start and finish, not at end of shift
- Downtime logged with a reason code, three taps on a tablet
- A rolling six-day schedule instead of a fixed weekly plan, so Tuesday surprises don’t wreck the whole week
- Friday meeting shortened to 30 minutes, and only for exceptions
The numbers after four months
On-time delivery went from 71% to 92%. Overtime dropped around 30%. Work-in-progress value fell by roughly £95,000 because jobs stopped sitting half-finished waiting for a decision.
The most surprising result was cultural. Two machine operators started suggesting schedule changes, because for the first time they could see why the sequence was what it was.
If your planning meeting runs longer than an hour, you’re doing scheduling work inside a meeting that should have been done before anyone walked in. Track how many hours you lose every Monday morning for two weeks. That number will tell you whether this is worth your attention.