Work Orders
A Work Order is a simple instruction to your shop floor: make this much of this product, in this one batch. It brings together the two things every job needs — the parts list (what goes in) and the route (the steps to build it) — and follows the job from the moment you decide to make it right through to the finished goods landing back on your shelf.
This page explains the ideas in plain terms. The step-by-step guides for raising, tracking and running a work order are linked at the bottom.
Availability depends on your plan and your role.
What a Work Order actually is
Think of a work order as a job card for one batch. Say you make wooden chairs, and today you want 50 of them. You raise one work order for those 50 chairs. That single card carries everything the job needs:
- The product and quantity — 50 chairs.
- The parts list — the wood, screws, cushions and glue that 50 chairs consume. (This comes from the product's bill of materials.)
- The route — the order of work: cut, assemble, sand, polish, inspect, pack.
One card, one batch. When you want to make another 50 next week, you raise another work order. Nothing is shared or muddled between the two — each batch has its own card, its own materials and its own progress.
The stages a work order moves through
Every work order has a status that tells you, at a glance, where the job stands. You never have to update it by hand for the normal flow — it moves as the work moves.
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Draft | You've written the card but not committed to it yet. It's a plan you can still change or throw away. |
| In Progress | The job is live on the floor. Its materials are set aside for it, and stages are being worked through. |
| Completed | Every stage is done and the finished goods have been received back into stock. The job is closed. |
| Pending | A special starting point: the job was created from Demand Planning but doesn't have a route chosen yet. It's waiting for you to say how it will be made before it can begin. |
| Cancelled | The job was called off. Any materials that were set aside for it are released back to general stock. |
So the normal life of a work order reads like a sentence: Draft → In Progress → Completed. A job that started from planning simply begins a step earlier, at Pending, until you pick its route.
Two ways to schedule: forwards or backwards
Every batch takes time, and a work order can work out that timing for you in one of two directions. You choose which fits the job.
| Schedule | You tell it… | It tells you… | Use it when… |
|---|---|---|---|
| Forwards | "Start now" (or on a chosen start date) | "…then here's when it will finish" | You want to begin as soon as materials allow and simply need to know the finish date. |
| Backwards | "It's due on this date" | "…so here's the latest you must start" | A customer has a delivery date, and you need to know when the floor has to begin to hit it. |
Both use the route's steps to estimate the time. Forward answers "when will it be ready?"; backward answers "when must we start?" Picking a due date and scheduling backwards is the everyday way to protect a promise to a customer.
Input readiness: do we have the parts?
The moment you choose a product, quantity and route, the work order lays out the materials the job will consume and checks each one against what you have in stock. This is the input-readiness — or coverage — check, and it reads just like the coverage tracker you already know from sales and purchasing:
200 needed = 150 ready from stock + 50 buying (on a purchase order) → 0 short
At a glance you know whether the batch can go ahead, and where any missing parts are coming from. If a material is short, the check flags it so you can order or transfer it before the floor is left waiting.
Read more about how these numbers work in Stores & Inventory.
Reserved materials: parts held for this job
Once a work order is approved and started, its input materials are reserved — quietly set aside so no other order, sale or job can take them. They're still physically on your shelf, but they're spoken-for by this batch.
This is the same idea as reserving stock for a customer's sales order: reserved, held, allocated, promised — one idea, one word. It means the parts you counted on when you planned the batch are protected right up until the floor actually consumes them. If you ever cancel the job, those materials are released straight back to general stock.
How a work order fits the bigger picture
A work order rarely stands alone. It usually sits between two other things:
- Before it — deciding what to make. Demand Planning looks at your orders and stock and decides which products need making. It can hand you work orders ready to go (these arrive as Pending until you pick a route).
- After it — the finished goods. When the last stage is done, the batch is received into stock as finished product, ready to sell or ship.
The short version: demand decides what to make, the route decides how it's made, and the work order is the card that carries one batch from start to shelf.
Related guides
- Raise a Work Order — pick the product, quantity, route and schedule, and check the parts are covered
- Track Work Orders — the list, the filters and a single job's detail
- Run a Work Order on the floor — the stage-by-stage shop-floor walkthrough
- Production overview — how planning, scheduling and material flow fit together
- BOM vs Work Order Process — the difference between a parts list and a production route
- Items — the products and materials a work order is built from
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