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Orders and production

How do you commit a delivery date you can actually keep?

Commit only after the plant has seen the order, the specification is complete and the material position is known. A date given at the negotiating table is a guess, and the guess becomes your reputation.

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In short

Commit only after the plant has seen the order, the specification is complete and the material position is known. A date given at the negotiating table is a guess, and the guess becomes your reputation.

Every plant has one person who gives optimistic dates to win the order, and one person who pays for them. Usually the second person is the works manager and the third is the customer.

The alternative is not slow. Confirm the date within a day, but confirm it from the production board, against the current load and the material lead time.

Once committed, the date lives on the order, not in a conversation, and any slippage is visible to the salesperson before it is visible to the buyer.

Related questions

What is a sales to production handover and why does it fail?

It is the moment a won order becomes a plant instruction with a committed date and a stock hold. It fails when sales promises a date the plant never agreed to, which is a communication gap, not a production problem.

How do you see order status without calling the shop floor?

Record progress where the work happens, at the job card, so status is a by-product of production rather than a separate reporting task. Then every order shows its own stage without anyone being interrupted.

What should happen when a customer changes the order mid-production?

Treat the change as a revision to the order record, not a verbal instruction: new specification, new quantity or new date, re-approved and re-committed. Undocumented changes are what turn a profitable order into a dispute.

How do you handle partial dispatches cleanly?

Track quantity ordered, produced, dispatched and pending on every order line, so a part dispatch reduces the balance instead of closing the order. Otherwise pending quantities are reconstructed from memory at month end.

System of Marketing & Sales

Put enquiry to dispatch on one governed line.

Tell us how your plant sells today. We'll show you where the line breaks and what it takes to close it.

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