Pending Orders Report: See Every Order's Status on One Page

What is a pending orders report?

A pending orders report is one list of every accepted order that is not yet fully dispatched. For each order line it shows the quantity pending, the customer date, the stage in the factory, and how late it is. It tells the owner which promises to customers are at risk.

In many plants the order status lives in people's heads. Sales asks planning. Planning asks production. Production asks the stores. By the time the answer comes, the customer has already phoned.

Often there are also two or three order lists in different offices. Accounts has one for billing. Sales has another. Production may have none. Nobody has the full picture, and a late order is found only when it is already late.

One clean list fixes this.

What does the report hold?

Each row is one item on one customer order, linked to its work order number. A good report has these parts:

• Order details: customer, order number and date, item, quantity, rate.
• Dates: the customer's required date, our planned date, and a revised date if it moved.
• Dispatches: every dispatch is entered as its own row, with the work order number. The pending quantity and value then work themselves out.
• Stage: where the order is now, such as material, cutting, machining, inspection or ready to dispatch.
• Status: open, on hold, closed, short closed or cancelled.
• Delay and reason: how many days late, and a reason code for the delay.

The cells you fill are few. Everything else is calculated, so it cannot be mistyped.

How should the pages be used?

A complete report gives several views of the same list. Each one answers an owner's question.

What are ageing buckets?

Late orders are not all equal. An order one day late and an order thirty days late need different action. So the report puts every order in a bucket:

1. On track.
2. Due in 7 days.
3. Overdue 1 to 7 days.
4. Overdue 8 to 15 days.
5. Overdue 16 to 30 days.
6. Overdue more than 30 days.

For each bucket, decide in advance what to do. For orders due in seven days, confirm that material and machine slots are ready. For orders that are many days late, call in the department head, and tell the customer before they ask.

Why must the customer date never be overwritten?

This is the most important habit. When a date slips, many plants type a new date over the old one. The history is gone. Nobody can say later how many times the promise was changed.

Instead:

• Keep the customer's date as it was.
• Write the new date in a revised date column.
• Increase the revision count by one.
• Choose a reason code from a list.

After a few months, a chart of the reasons shows which department causes most delay. Is it material, planning, the machine, quality or the customer's own drawing approval? You can now fix the system. You do not need to blame a person.

A late order is a message. The reason code tells you who needs to listen.

How to run the weekly review

1. Refresh the data before the meeting.
2. Read the dashboard: live orders, pending value, overdue value.
3. Go through the overdue orders, oldest first. Ask the owner of each to confirm the status line by line.
4. Look at the stage view. If most orders wait at one stage, such as purchase or cutting, chase that stage. Do not book more orders.
5. For every overdue order, write an action with an owner and a date.
6. Begin the next meeting by reading this list.

This is Report-Review-Action at work. Reading the sheet with the owner, line by line, also makes it his habit.

How to start in your plant

1. Build the first sheet with your team, using real orders. Enter one order together, then let the team enter all the open orders within a week.
2. Start with orders that are in production now. Do not copy old lines that are "open" only on paper.
3. Make the stage list match your real process, and correct it after the process flow is drawn.
4. Keep one master copy with rates and values for management. Give supervisors and dispatch a copy without the rate.
5. Let new orders enter the list from one source only.
6. Fix a day and time for the weekly review.

Process first, tool second. The list needs a habit around it more than it needs fancy software.