When a work order has outgrown the task board

What breaks when work orders live on a task board

A task board models a list of things to do. A work order is not a list of things to do. It is one object that has to pass through departments in a fixed order, collecting information as it goes, and it has a state that matters to money at the end.

So people bolt on conventions. A column per department. A checklist in the description. A naming convention in the title. A rule that you do not move the card until the drawing is attached. All of these are honour systems, and none of them survive a busy week.

The specific failures are always the same three. A job moves to the next department without the information that department needs, so somebody walks back to ask. A job gets marked done when it is not, because marking it done is a drag. And nobody can reconstruct afterwards what actually happened, because a card carries no history worth reading.

Keep your stock system. Replace the job tracking half

If you run inventory, bills of materials and purchasing in a dedicated system, keep it. Streams has no inventory, no BOM and no stock levels, and it is not trying to have them.

What it replaces is the other half: the running of the job itself, from enquiry to quote to build to QA to despatch to invoice. It refuses to let a job skip a stage, keeps the evidence on the job rather than in somebody's email, and pushes the invoice into your Xero or QuickBooks.

The two do not fight. Stock stays where stock is understood. The job stops being a card somebody drags.

Gates where the money and the quality are

Say what each stage needs before a job leaves it. A signed drawing before it goes to the floor. A QA sheet and an inspector's name before despatch. A serial number before it is invoiced. The job stays where it is until those fields have values, and the person is told which ones are missing.

You can gate on actions too, not just fields. A job cannot leave the quoting stage until the quote has actually been sent, or until the customer has actually accepted it, whichever you pick. A job cannot be closed until an invoice has been raised, or until it has been paid in full. Only genuine work counts: a cancelled quote or a voided invoice does not satisfy the gate.

Bring the spreadsheet you already run on

Most production processes are already written down, in a spreadsheet with a status column and twenty other columns of detail. Upload it. The columns become fields with sensible types, the status column becomes the stages, and you review the whole proposed process before anything is created.

It also reads an SOP, a Word procedure or a slide deck, if that is where your process actually lives. You edit whatever it got wrong, and you are running in an afternoon rather than a month.