Manufacturing orders

A manufacturing order is one unit of production: build this much of this thing, at this location. Where a bill of materials says how something is built, a manufacturing order says this one is being built now.

Where they come from

Most manufacturing orders are made-to-order. They’re attached to a line on a customer’s Shopify order, because something has to be produced before that line can be fulfilled. Two things cause that:

• Someone bought a made-to-order product, and it has to be built from its bill of materials
• Someone bought a customisable product and personalised it, so the line carries an attribute that matched one of your customisation intents

The second kind has no materials to consume. The work is the engraving or the embroidery, not the assembly, so the order carries the instruction instead of a list of inputs.

The rest are build-to-stock, attached to no customer order at all. You’re building ahead, usually a component that goes into something else later.

Only made-to-order production reaches back into Shopify. Flow triggers, the block on the order page, and the badge in customer accounts all report against a customer’s order, and a build-to-stock order doesn’t have one to report against. Those stay inside Orderkraft.

One order line can have more than one manufacturing order. That happens when production is split, for example across two locations. The combined output of those orders can’t exceed what the customer actually bought.

Statuses

A manufacturing order is always in exactly one of six statuses:

Status changes are made in Orderkraft. The Shopify order page, customer accounts, and Flow only read them.

The ship-by date

Every made-to-order manufacturing order gets a ship-by date the moment it’s created: the date it should be finished and handed to the carrier. It’s the order date plus the product’s maximum lead time, so it’s the worst case of the promise the customer saw on the product page, not the average.

The date is fixed once, at creation. Editing the product’s lead time later doesn’t move it, because the promise to this customer was already made. Build-to-stock orders have no ship-by date at all, since there’s no customer waiting on them.

How close a ship-by date is shows up as an urgency state:

An order that’s on track shows no urgency at all, and neither does one that’s completed or cancelled. If an order does finish after its ship-by date, the detail page says so with a This order shipped late banner, so a late delivery is visible in the history rather than only in the customer’s inbox.

The full picture — what the date depends on, what the badges mean everywhere they show up, and how sorting plays with urgency — lives on Ship-by dates.

Holds

Putting an order on hold records a note explaining why: waiting on a fabric delivery, a machine down, a customer changing their mind mid-build. An order can carry several holds at once, and each one is released separately. The order goes back to production when the hold is lifted.

Holds are the part of production that support usually has to chase, so the note travels with the status. It shows on the manufacturing order detail view in Shopify, which means whoever answers the customer can read the reason without asking the floor.

The timeline

Every status change is recorded as an event with a timestamp and, where there was one, the person who made it. Read top to bottom, the timeline is the production history of that order: when it was created, when it started, every hold and release, and when it finished.

The material list

A manufacturing order’s inputs are the materials production consumes. Each one is tagged with where it came from. From bill of materials means it’s part of the product’s recipe. Customer’s choice means it came from the order itself: a part the customer picked in the cart on a built-on-the-fly product, with the material name linking back to that line on the Shopify order. One order can carry both kinds, the recipe and the picks side by side.

The production queue

In Orderkraft, the manufacturing orders index is the queue the floor works from. Above the list, three tiles count what’s urgent: Overdue, Due today, and Due soon. They count across the whole shop or the selected location, regardless of any filter you’ve set, so a filtered view never hides a late order. Clicking a tile filters the list to just those orders.

The list sorts by order date, most recent first, or by ship-by date, soonest due first. Sorting by ship-by turns the queue into a work order: whatever has to leave next sits at the top.

Orders can also be handled in bulk. Selecting rows opens an action bar with Place on hold and Lift holds, for the moments a material delivery slips and forty orders have to pause at once. A bulk hold asks for one reason, which lands on every selected order. Orders that can’t take the action, like one already on hold, are skipped and named rather than failing the whole batch.

How statuses roll up to an order line

Customers don’t see manufacturing orders. They see the item they bought. So when a line has manufacturing orders behind it, Orderkraft reduces them to a single status for that line.

If there’s only one manufacturing order, the line reports its status. If there are several and they disagree, the line reports the one furthest along, labelled as partial: a line with one order still queued and one already in production reads as Partially in progress.

The order of progress is:

1. Cancelled
2. Draft
3. Waiting
4. In progress
5. On hold
6. Completed

Cancelled ranks lowest on purpose. A cancelled manufacturing order alongside a live one shouldn’t make the line look cancelled when something is still being built for it.

Lines with no manufacturing orders behind them don’t report a status at all. That’s every stocked item that nobody has to touch before it ships. A stocked item that was engraved does report one, because something is being produced for it.

Where you see them

• In Orderkraft, as the production queue with the urgency tiles, sorting, and the actions that change status
• On the Shopify order page, as a block listing the manufacturing orders for that order, with their ship-by dates
• In customer accounts, as a status badge on each line item
• In Shopify Flow, as triggers that fire on each status change