I sat in a meeting with a 120-person factory that made metal enclosures. The owner was furious. Orders were going out three weeks late, overtime was eating 14% of payroll, and when he asked the production manager why, the answer was always “the schedule is tight.”
But the schedule wasn’t the problem. The real problem was they were planning with a whiteboard and a gut feeling. ERP Consulting got involved, and the first thing we did was map how long each job actually spent in each machine center.
What we found made the owner go quiet
One press machine sat idle 6 hours a day because the operator had to chase down materials. Another machine ran 22 hours straight because everyone “knew” it was the bottleneck. The gap between what they thought was happening and what was real cost them roughly $40,000 a month in late penalties and rush freight.
I’ve seen this pattern in at least a dozen plants. The fix isn’t buying better forklifts. It’s having a system that shows every order against every machine’s real capacity.
- Pick your three busiest machines and write down how many hours they actually run per day—not what the schedule says, what the clock says
- List your top ten overdue orders and trace where each one stalled; most shops find the same two or three choke points
- Track how much time operators spend walking or waiting—anything above 15% is a planning gap, not a labor problem
What changed when we set real capacity numbers
We rebuilt the production plan with honest capacity numbers: the bottleneck machine got scheduled first, and everything else was pulled around it. Within six weeks, on-time delivery went from 43% to 78%. Overtime dropped because jobs stopped bouncing between machines in random order.
Here’s the part managers miss—the schedule is a contract between sales and production. If the planner commits to a date that ignores real capacity, the whole company is lying to the customer. ERP Consulting doesn’t magically give you more hours in a day. It forces you to face the truth about the hours you have.
The one change that mattered most
The owner started a 10-minute daily meeting at 8:05 AM, standing by the bottleneck machine, not in a conference room. Every department head had to state what was coming to the bottleneck that day and what was missing. That tiny habit created more accountability than any software feature.
If your delivery dates are slipping, start there. Measure the bottleneck honestly for one week before you even talk about software. When you’re ready for the system piece, bring ERP Consulting into the conversation early—not after you’ve already bought something that runs on made-up numbers.