Skip to content

Orders and production

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.

Talk to usAll answers

In short

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.

In most plants the handover is a phone call or a forwarded message. The works manager finds out about the order when the material is needed, and the date the customer was given has no relationship to the load on the machine.

A review gate between the booked order and the shop floor fixes it. Somebody checks the specification is complete, the price is approved, the material is available or ordered, and the plant confirms the date before the customer hears it.

It slows the first day slightly and saves the following three weeks.

How the review gate works

Related questions

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.

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.

Talk to usBook a Demo
WhatsAppBook a Demo