Production board

Operate, then Production. Five columns, one card per job, drag to advance. This is where the shop runs.

Reading the board

Each card shows the order number, the customer, the units and the due date, plus a substage chip where one applies, such as "Press 2, 60%" or "3 of 8 cartons". Column headers carry a count, and the header strip shows how many jobs are due this week.

The Dispatched column shows the last 14 days with a View all link, so the board stays about work in flight rather than becoming an archive.

Advancing a job

Three ways, all equivalent:

Way	Best for
Drag the card	Working at a laptop or a tablet
Advance to [stage] on the order	When you are already looking at the order
Barcode scan the worksheet	Hands-busy work on the floor. Fastest by far

Every move does the same things regardless of how you trigger it:

• Appends a row to the order's stage history with the time and who moved it.
• Fires the customer comms for that stage.
• Consumes stock on entry to In production.
• Issues the invoice on entry to Dispatched.
• Notifies any webhook subscriber.
• Pushes the change to every other open board in the shop, so the wall TV, the sales tablet and your phone all agree.

Moving a job backwards

Dragging a card back is allowed, and sometimes right: a QC reject goes back to production. Two things to know:

• The backwards move is recorded in stage history, so it is visible in the audit trail rather than silent.
• Comms and stock movements already triggered are not reversed. A customer who has been told the job is on the press does not get an un-told. If stock needs correcting, adjust it with a reason.

Header shortcuts

The board header links to the time clock and the floor board, which are the two other screens the floor uses.

When the board gets crowded

Three ways to keep a busy board readable:

• Use the operator stations so each station sees only its own queue.
• Use batch production to gang jobs that share a design or a method into one press run.
• Keep your stage list to five or six. Every extra stage is another column to scan.

Habits that matter

• Advance when it happens, not at the end of the day. The board is only useful if it is true, and the customer emails go out based on it.
• Do not park jobs in the wrong column to make the board look tidier. Add a stage such as awaiting_stock if you genuinely have a holding state.
• Watch the Artwork column. Anything sitting there is waiting on a customer, not on you, and that is what the chase email is for.