Nobody gets lost on a single button. They get lost because they cannot see the shape of the thing. So here it is, drawn: every place an order can be, what puts it there, and what gets it out. Tap any stage on the drawing.
Read it left to right. Solid lines are cuts — the path an order really travels. Dashed lines are creases — the two ways an order folds sideways off the board and comes back.
Recorded, or worked out? This is the distinction that catches people out, and there are three kinds of fact on this sheet, not two. Recorded — somebody pressed something and the system wrote it down for good: processing, removal, a tap at a machine, a hold, a delivery. Worked out on every screen refresh — the stage itself. No order carries a stage; the system decides which of the four an order is in each time you load the page, from the facts underneath. Guessed — only where the floor has not tapped, the system assumes the steps before the one being worked are done. A step that was actually tapped always beats the guess, and the card tells you which you are looking at.
Read the numbers carefully. Only 1, 3, 4 and 5 are real stages — and even they are not written down anywhere. There is no stage field on an order: the system works out which of the four it is in every time a screen loads. That is why fixing the facts underneath — a supplier date, a received board — moves an order by itself, with nobody pressing anything. 6, 7 and 8 all happen while the order is still In Production — the same order, seen on a different screen. 9 is off the board altogether. The Order Book has six tabs, not four: the four stages plus In Deliveries and Removed, which are ways of looking rather than places to be. If you go looking for a Despatch tab you will not find one.
Three of the four ways an order seems to disappear are drawn on the plate above. None of them is a fault.
A query pulls the order out of the Order Book entirely. It is not hidden and it is not lost — it is sitting with Operations, the GM, Sales or Deliveries, and only they can hand it back.
Look on Order Queries. Answering it returns the order to New Orders with the answer attached.
Remove is for things that were never real orders — leads, price enquiries, duplicates. Nothing is deleted. It is on the Removed tab with the reason against it.
Restore takes two clicks: the first turns the button into Confirm restore. Click once and walk away and nothing happens.
An order with a booked delivery shows in In Production and in In Deliveries. One order, two tabs. That overlap is deliberate and it is drawn as a crease on the plate.
Not a duplicate. Do not try to close one of them.
An orange TEST DATA pill means you are not looking at the factory. The fix is
to delete ?demo or ?live off
the end of the web address and reload.
Ignore the pill's own advice to add ?live, and ignore any
message telling you to add ?svc. Both make it worse.
On the floor tablet the pill is shorter — TEST DATA (demo mode) — and gives no advice at all, which is the one screen that gets this right.
Stage 6 on the plate above, drawn close up. Open Floor, tap your machine along the top, and the tablet remembers it next time. A tablet can also be bound to one machine by the office, in which case it says so across the top and the other machines are greyed out — that is deliberate, and a bound tablet has no Goods In either.
All three are on screen. The two that are not your turn are faded and cannot be pressed, so you can only ever do the next step in order.
Start setup faded — already started, by you or someone else; the card says who. Setup complete faded — press Start setup first. All three faded — two possible reasons, and the card tells you which. Either it shows -/- for steps, which means the job description needs fixing in the office; or the job is on hold, in red. Nothing on the tablet will help with either one.
Rush-pinned jobs first, then whatever running order the office has set with its Top, ↑ and ↓ buttons, then earliest production due date. Your tablet, the office board and the wall TV agree — if the office moves a job to the top, it moves on your screen too, though a rush pin still outranks it.
A red “Offline — action not recorded” means the tap is gone. It is not saved up and sent later. Get signal and do it again.
Tapping twice is safe — the second tap is thrown away. It cannot finish a job twice or start a second timer.
It goes to the next machine on its routing, or to Despatch if you were the last step, and it disappears off your queue. That is the tap working, not the tap failing. The next job moves up to #1.
Sometimes it stays on your screen, and that is also the tap working. When the next step is an operation rather than one named machine — stripping, gluing, packing — several machines can do that work and only a person knows which one today. The job waits at your machine until the office places it. Your step and your time are already recorded.
Do not tap Finish again to make it move. A second finish records the NEXT step against your machine, and that cannot be edited afterwards. Tell the office the job is waiting and start your next one.
If nothing happened at all — no time recorded, nothing changed — your tap did not land. Look for the red message rather than tapping again.
A job on hold carries a red line on the card and all three buttons go flat. You cannot start it, complete a setup on it or finish it, and the server refuses the tap even if the screen is stale.
“Held by the office” — ask your supervisor. They can lift it. “Held for a failed quality check” — nobody on the floor can lift that one, and neither can the office's Release button. It takes a level 4 waiver, in writing, on Factory Operations. On a quality hold the card also shows the note from the check that failed, so you can see what was wrong.
Count what actually arrived; do not copy the paperwork. Type the exact quantity and your name. All here immediately marks the board received on every job on that purchase order — not just the one in front of you — and pushes them all into production, which is stage 4 to stage 5 on Plate 1. If more is coming, press Partial — more coming.
A red mismatch line is a flag for the office, not an error by you. Never change your count to make it match.
Finish operation
On the wrong job, it records that job's process as complete under your name. There is no undo on the tablet and tapping more buttons will not fix it. Read the PRO number before you tap, and if you get it wrong, tell your supervisor straight away.
All here, at Goods In
One tap, no confirm box, and it reaches further than the job in front of you: it marks the board received on every job on that purchase order and pushes them all into production. Nothing asks you twice. If any of the board is still to come, press Partial — more coming instead — the system will never work this out from the numbers.
Mark delivered
It closes the order. The confirm box — “Mark delivered and close this order in Phoenix?” — is the only protection there is. Read the PRO number on the card before you confirm. A pickup reads Mark collected and does exactly the same thing.
Waive QA — not undone, but never forgotten
Waiving a failed quality check puts the job back on the machine, and it is the only thing that can. Your name, the time and your written reason stay on that job for good. That is the point of it: somebody decided, and the record says who. Level 4 only.
Everything else is recoverable
A removed order can be restored — Remove never deletes anything, it moves the order to the Removed tab and its own dialog says so. A job can be moved back to a machine. An ordinary office hold can be released. A delivery can be moved to another run. A query can be handed back. Tell someone rather than clicking more — that is almost always the whole fix.
Buttons are shown here by their words, not their exact colour — on screen some are filled, some outlined, some plain underlined text. This sheet describes the system as built. If the drawing and the screen disagree, the screen is right and this drawing needs redrawing. Say so.