Work orders from orders
Confirming a sales order generates the work orders, carrying the bill of material through as the build kit.
Kanban by stage
Fabrication, wiring, testing, QC, ready — see where every panel is on one board and move it with a tap.
Material availability
Check each job's requirements against stock and open purchases before releasing it to the floor.
Planner agent
A suggested build order that flags late-risk and material-blocked jobs, advisory rather than automatic.
Quality checklists
Recorded against the job before dispatch, so the test record lives with the panel it belongs to.
Dispatch to invoice
Delivery documentation from the same record, flowing into invoicing without re-entry.
The whiteboard works until it does not
Most panel shops run production on a whiteboard, a WhatsApp group and the foreman's memory. For a handful of jobs that is genuinely efficient — it is fast, everyone can see it, and it costs nothing.
It breaks at a particular point: when the number of live jobs exceeds what one person can hold in their head, when the owner starts being asked for delivery dates they cannot verify, and when the answer to 'why is that panel not finished' takes a walk around the workshop to establish. At that point the whiteboard is not saving time, it is hiding the queue.
Every panel has a state, and the state is visible
Zaptiz gives each work order an explicit stage and shows them on a board. Anyone who needs to know where a job is can see it without interrupting the person building it, and the customer question 'is it ready' gets answered in seconds from a desk.
The stages are the ones a panel shop actually uses — fabrication, assembly, wiring, testing, quality check, ready for dispatch — and moving a job is a tap on a phone, because the person who knows a panel has been wired is the person who wired it, not an administrator transcribing notes later.
Do not start what you cannot finish
Half-built panels are the most expensive inventory in the building: the material is committed, the labour is spent, the space is occupied and nothing can be invoiced. They accumulate when jobs are released to the floor without checking that the components are actually there.
The material availability view compares each job's requirements against current stock and open purchase orders, so the shortage surfaces before the job starts rather than in the middle of it. When something is short, procurement already knows — the same shortage drives the requisition.
- See required, in stock, on order and short for every line of every open job.
- Release jobs to the floor deliberately, in an order that reflects due dates and material.
- Blocked jobs are visible as blocked rather than as mysteriously slow.
Planning that suggests rather than dictates
The production planner agent reviews open jobs against their promised dates and material position and proposes a build order, highlighting what is at risk of being late and what cannot proceed. It writes nothing to the schedule.
That restraint is intentional. A scheduling system that reorders the workshop automatically is ignored by the second week, because reality on a shop floor includes things the software cannot see. A ranked list that says 'these three are at risk and this one is blocked' is advice a foreman will actually read.
Frequently asked questions
How do work orders get created?
From the sales order. Confirming an order generates the work orders for the panels on it, carrying the bill of material through as the kit the shop needs. Nobody re-enters the job on the workshop side.
Do people on the shop floor need to use a computer?
They need a browser on a phone or tablet. The shop-floor view is a simple list of jobs with the stage each is at, so moving a panel from wiring to testing is a tap rather than a form.
How do we know a job has all its material before we start it?
The material availability view compares each job's requirements against stock and shows what is short and what is on order. Starting a panel you cannot finish is the most expensive kind of work in progress, so the check comes first.
What does the production planner agent do?
It ranks open jobs into a suggested build order and flags the ones at risk of running late or blocked on material. It is advisory — it writes nothing to your schedule. The foreman still decides; the agent makes sure the awkward job is not the one nobody noticed.
Can we record quality checks?
Yes. Quality checklists are completed against each job before dispatch, so the record of what was tested exists alongside the job rather than on a clipboard that gets filed and never found again.
What happens at dispatch?
Dispatch produces the delivery documentation from the same job record and moves the order towards invoicing, so what was despatched, what was built and what gets billed are the same set of lines.