At 9:15 AM on a Tuesday, a production manager at a 200-person custom fabrication shop got the call every plant manager hates. The purchasing team had ordered 4,200 steel brackets for a job that wasn’t confirmed, while the actual rush order for 850 units sat waiting with no material. Four hours of firefighting and three angry customers later, he’d finally had enough.
How visible is your production load, really?
The honest answer at most plants is “sort of.” The manager could see current work orders, but nothing showed him what the load would look like six days out. The morning meeting turned into guessing: who can start what, and when? An ERP Consulting review at this plant took two days and found the real issue wasn’t the router data — it was who had the authority to change dates.
Three people from three departments could edit the schedule, and none of them had to tell anyone else. That’s a people-process problem dressed up as a software problem. The fix is never technical.
- Give one person final sign-off on any schedule change — not two, not three
- Publish a daily 10:00 AM “load sheet” showing work for the next 10 days, even if the forecast is rough
- Freeze purchase orders once a job is issued; changes only go through a formal revision
What happened after the review
The fix wasn’t a big rollout. It was a weekly 45-minute load review where the planner shows the same screen to sales and purchasing. Within 60 days, late deliveries dropped from 27% to 9%. The same plant also discovered the machine that seemed overloaded was simply being fed the wrong jobs — rebalancing added the equivalent of 5.5 working hours per day.
Weeks later, the manager told me the quiet truth. The software was never going to fix the culture of date-jumping. The ERP Consulting work mostly forced a discipline of saying no, then giving one official reason, in writing, on one screen. That was the whole project. That was enough.