Work order tracking for job shops: knowing where every job is

What is a work order, and how is it different from a production order?

A work order is the instruction that tells the shop floor "make this many of this part, with this operation, by this date". If you use an ERP, the production order usually lives there and covers a finished item as a whole, such as "make 500 flanges". On the floor, though, those flanges go through saw, turning, milling and inspection, and each step happens on a different machine, with a different person, at a different time.

That is why job tracking works best at the operation level, where every routing step is its own work order. "How far along is the flange order?" is answered by how many of its steps are done. In a job shop one order can mean dozens of parts and hundreds of steps, and those steps are what needs tracking.

What a work order should carry

The first six fields are filled in when the work order is created, and the last three come from doing the work. The second group is the hard part. If the person doing the job does not record it while doing it, it is almost impossible to get right afterwards.

Work order statuses

Keep statuses few and clear. For most shops these six are enough:

Keeping "Paused" as its own status matters. Jobs that show as "in progress" but are really waiting are where delays hide most often. Recording why a job was paused shows where the waiting comes from. That is covered in machine downtime tracking.

Paper, spreadsheets or work order tracking software

Paper and spreadsheets work well with a few jobs and a few people. They usually break when the number of open jobs grows beyond what the supervisor can keep in their head. From then on "where is that job?" gets asked dozens of times a day. Moving off spreadsheets step by step is covered in MES vs Excel.

Setting up job tracking, step by step

1. Define resource groups, such as CNC lathes, CNC mills, saws, welding and assembly. Writing jobs to a group rather than to one machine makes it easy to give the job to whichever machine in the group is free.
2. Write routings. Start with your most frequent parts and enter each part's sequence of operations, their group and estimated time. Parts without a routing need their work orders created by hand every time.
3. Turn each order into jobs. For every incoming order enter the parts and quantities and apply the routing, so that every step becomes a work order.
4. Send a traveler with the parts. A card with a barcode or QR code per step lets the operator report which job they started without typing.
5. Have the person doing the work record it. They start the job, pause it with a reason and finish it with good and scrap counts. A record filled in at the office at the end of the day is history, not tracking.
6. Review the queues every day. Where is work piling up, which project is getting tight? A short morning meeting is enough.
7. Feed actual times back into planning. After a few weeks, compare actual times with the routing estimates and correct the routings.

What to measure

• On-time delivery is the share of projects finished by their due date. It is the one number the customer sees.
• Open work and backlog tell you how many hours of work wait in each resource group, and how many days of queue that is at daily capacity.
• The actual vs planned ratio is actual time ÷ planned time. Above 1 means plans are consistently optimistic.
• Lead time runs from the first step of an order starting to its last step finishing. Processing time is usually a small part of it and waiting is the large part.
• Track why jobs are late, too. Capacity, material or a previous step? Delays whose cause is unknown come back.

The actual vs planned ratio changes due dates directly. If past jobs in a machine group took on average 24% longer than planned, the ratio is 1.24. The 40 hours of planned work left in that group is then really about 49.6 hours. A shop that quotes due dates from the 40 hours will be a day and a half late every time.

Common mistakes

1. Opening the whole order as one work order. "Flange order, in progress" tells you nothing. To know which step it is at, every operation needs its own record.
2. Recording in the office. A record filled in at the end of the day from what operators said rounds the hours and erases the waits.
3. Leaving paused jobs as "in progress". A job that is waiting should look like it is waiting. Otherwise the delay stays hidden until the due date.
4. Never updating planned times. Times guessed years ago start every new due date calculation with the same error.
5. Letting everyone change priority. When every job is "urgent", none is. One person sets priority and the system shows the queue.

Work order tracking in ModernMES

ModernMES is work order tracking software for shops that work to project or order. A customer order is opened as a project, you add the parts, and you apply a saved routing to each part. Every routing step becomes its own work order, created with its planned time in the "Planned" status and placed in its resource group's queue. There is no need to create work orders one by one. The steps belong to that project, so changing them later does not change the saved routing.

1. Import parts and routings in bulk from an Excel template. When applying a routing you can have its times recalculated from history.
2. Print the project's route card (traveler). For every step it carries a Code128 barcode for the terminal's scanner or a QR code for a phone.
3. At the terminal the operator scans their badge or enters their code. Then they scan the card's barcode or pick the job from that machine's "Up next" list. Each job in the queue shows its due date. The screen shows the job's planned machine, and another one can be chosen if needed.
4. If the part's previous step is not finished, the terminal warns. An operator who really needs to can choose "Start anyway".
5. When pausing they pick a reason, and when finishing they enter the good and scrap quantities.
6. An operator working from a phone pairs it once with a QR code, then scans the QR on the route card or the label stuck on the machine to open that machine's jobs.

What the office sees

• The work order page shows planned and actual time, planned and actual dates, and the status history.
• The project page shows percent complete, steps finished out of the total, and hours worked against hours planned. Its Deadline Assessment card compares the project's remaining work with each resource group's capacity up to the due date, after the other open work already on it. It marks the project "On Track", "Tight" or "Over Capacity" and shows the earliest finish date at the current load.
• The live shop floor view shows which job runs on which machine, who is on it and which machines are waiting. It refreshes every 15 seconds.
• For the Work Monitor you pick up to 10 resource groups to show on a TV on the floor. The board shows waiting, upcoming, in-progress and paused jobs full screen, with no menus.
• The production status report has tabs for deadline forecast, workload, project status, work queue, planned vs actual and operator hours. The table on screen exports to Excel with one click. Remaining work is corrected by each group's actual-to-planned ratio over the last 18 months.

Every start and finish writes the actual time onto the job. Each night ModernMES recalculates the typical (median) time of every operation from those records and uses it to suggest times on new routings, so the next quote and the next due date start from records, not memory. If you use an ERP, finished work can be booked in it through the ERP integration. Work order events can also be sent to other systems you use with webhooks.

ModernMES is not a scheduling (Gantt) tool. The Deadline Assessment assumes work can be spread freely across the machines in a group, and does not model setup sequence or step dependencies. Treat it as an early warning, not a schedule.

Have a look at the live shop floor demo or start a 14-day free trial without a credit card. Plans are in the pricing section. For an example flow in a machine shop, see production tracking for CNC machine shops.

Frequently asked questions