How to track jobs through a fabrication workshop

Why jobs get lost between stages

A job rarely stalls in the middle of a stage. It stalls in the gaps: cutting is finished but nobody told the fabricators; fabrication is waiting for a drawing revision; the painter is waiting for the QC sign-off; the QC inspector never heard the job was ready. Each person knows their own piece of work perfectly, and nobody can see the whole route.

Tracking is simply making that whole route visible: which stage each job is in, who has it, and whether it is moving.

Break the job into stages people recognise

Use the words your workshop already uses. For structural and plate work a typical route looks like this:

1. Engineering and drawings
2. Material ordered and received
3. Cutting
4. Fabrication and fit-up
5. Welding
6. QC inspection
7. Surface preparation and painting
8. Dispatch

A few rules keep this useful. Use between five and ten stages: fewer hides the problem, more is a chore to maintain. Make each stage something that clearly starts and clearly finishes. And let a job skip a stage that does not apply to it, rather than forcing every job through every step.

Keep a different route for a different kind of work. A set of handrails and a structural frame are not the same job, and a route that includes stages most jobs skip teaches people to ignore it.

Give every stage a name and every job an owner

Two kinds of ownership matter. A stage needs the name of the person who will do it, so they know it is theirs. A job needs one person responsible for the whole thing: the one who chases the material, answers the customer and makes sure the card is closed. Without that person, everyone assumes someone else is watching.

Write the names down. A stage assigned to "the welders" is not assigned.

Measure progress honestly

"About 70% done" is a guess, and guesses drift upward until the last stage is held up by a surprise. A measure that cannot drift is the share of stages that are finished.

• Count the stages that apply to the job. A skipped stage does not count either way.
• Progress is the number finished out of that total: three of six stages is 50%.
• If you plan hours for each stage, weight by hours: a welding stage planned at 20 hours should count for more than a dispatch stage planned at 1.

This is how Fabricata Flow calculates progress, and it also shows how the percentage was worked out, so nobody has to take it on trust. You can do the same on paper.

Show what is blocked, and why

A stuck job is different from a slow one, and it needs different action. Mark a stage as blocked and write down the reason in a few words: waiting for material, drawing revision outstanding, customer approval pending, crane unavailable.

Two things follow. The person who can fix it sees it the same day instead of when the customer phones. And over a few weeks the reasons show you a pattern: if "waiting for material" appears on most blocked jobs, the problem is in purchasing, not in the workshop.

A ten-minute daily routine

Tracking only works if somebody looks. Ten minutes at the start of the day, with the foreman and whoever plans the work, is enough:

1. Late and due this week. Which jobs will miss their date unless something changes?
2. Blocked. What is stuck, why, and who is dealing with it today?
3. Next. Which job does each station start next?
4. Unassigned. Is any stage waiting for a name?

If those four questions can be answered in ten minutes from a board or a stack of cards, the tracking is working. If they take an hour of walking and phoning, it is not.

Paper, whiteboard or software?

A job card that travels with the work and a whiteboard in the office will take a small workshop a long way. They start to strain when you run more than a handful of jobs at once, when the owner or planner is often away from the workshop, or when customers want an answer without you walking to the floor.

That is the gap Fabricata Flow is built for. It prints the job card, tracks every stage and shows a live board of the workshop, while paper stays the working record on the floor. You can start with the free job card template and read what a job card is if you are starting from scratch, or try Flow free for 14 days.