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 product, the quantity and the route — the Work Order Process that lists the steps to build it and the materials each step uses — 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 route — the order of work: cut, assemble, sand, polish, inspect, pack. It comes from a Work Order Process made for the chair.
- The materials — the wood, screws, cushions and glue that 50 chairs consume. These come from the route too: each stage lists what it uses, and the work order multiplies that by the batch size.
- The planned start — the day the batch starts. Every work order needs one.
A work order is planned entirely from its route. A Bill of Materials is still used elsewhere — for Stock Conversion, for Job Order kits, and for adding a BOM's parts to a document — but not to make a work order.
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 Review | Released, but your business's production approval rules need someone to sign it off first. Nothing is reserved yet — it moves to Open once the last approver approves. |
| Rejected | An approver turned the release down. Nothing was reserved for it, so no materials are held; the work order can't be released again — raise a new one if the job is still needed. |
| Open | Released to the shop floor and ready to start. Its input materials are now reserved for it. A work order can only be released once it has a Planned Start date. |
| In Progress | The job is live on the floor. Its materials stay 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 | An older job raised from Demand Planning without a route. A route can't be added to it now — cancel it and raise a new work order with its Work Order Process. (Demand Planning now asks for the route before it raises anything, so new jobs don't arrive this way.) |
| 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 → Open → In Progress → Completed. You release a draft to the floor with Release on the Work Orders list, which moves it to Open.
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, route and quantity, the work order lays out the materials the route says 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 released to Open, the materials it needs count as demand from its Planned Start date — counted once for the whole run — so planning knows they'll be wanted by that day. At the same moment, its input materials are reserved — whatever of them is free in stock is quietly set aside so no other order, sale or job can take it. They're still physically on your shelf, but they're spoken-for by this batch. Only free stock can be held: if you're short, the missing part isn't held — it still shows as a need in planning, so you can buy or make it.
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 held for the batch are protected until the floor consumes them. Holds that go unused are released automatically once the work order's expected completion date has passed, and if you cancel the job, they're 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 raise work orders for you — you choose the route and the planned start for each one before it's raised.
- 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
- Work Order Process — the route a work order follows, and where its materials come from
- 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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