Guides

How to tell which jobs will be late before the customer calls

By the time a job is overdue, the only choices left are to pay for overnight freight or to make an apologetic call. Most late jobs give warning days or weeks earlier. The warning is already in your ERP, spread across the job, purchase order and labor screens, where nobody puts it together.

Six signs a job is heading for late

1. Its material won't arrive in time

The job needs a part, and either nothing is on order, the order has no expected date, or the order is due after the step that needs it. This is the most common cause, and the easiest to miss, because the job itself looks fine until the step that needs the part is reached.

2. The supplier usually runs late

The order is promised in time, but this supplier is usually a week late. A promise date is not a forecast. If a supplier's record says to expect it five days late, plan on five days late. Our guide to measuring supplier on-time delivery shows how to work that record out.

3. Work is moving slower than the schedule assumes

Divide the hours left by the hours a day the job has actually been getting. If that comes to more working days than are left before the due date, the job is late already, whatever the schedule says.

4. It will miss the customer's promise, even if not its own date

A job can be on time against its own due date and still be later than the ship date someone promised on the sales order. Check the job against the order line it makes, not only against itself.

5. Its due date keeps moving

A job rescheduled twice is a job nobody trusts. It may look on time against today's date, but the customer remembers the first one.

6. Nobody has touched it

No labor, no status change and no receipts for a week usually means the job is waiting on something nobody has written down.

Checking it by hand

You can do this with a spreadsheet once a week. Export three lists from your ERP: open jobs with their due dates and hours left, open purchase order lines with the job they're for and their expected dates, and labor booked to each job over the last two weeks. Then, for each job:

1. Work out its pace: hours booked over the last two weeks, divided by the working days in them.
2. Project the finish: today plus hours left divided by pace, in working days.
3. Find the latest expected date of any material it is still waiting for. If that is later than the projected finish, use it instead.
4. Flag every job whose projected finish is after its due date, or after the promise on its sales order.

Why it doesn't last

The spreadsheet takes a morning to build and is out of date by Tuesday. The joins between jobs, orders and labor are done by hand, so they break when someone adds a column. And the list says which jobs, but not why, so somebody still has to open each one to find out what to do.

How Shop Traveler does it

Shop Traveler reads your ERP every 15 minutes, read-only, and checks every open job against fourteen plain rules: overdue, due soon, projected to finish late, set to miss the customer's promise, rescheduled again and again, quiet, over budget, short of material, waiting on a late order or a supplier who usually runs late, and more. Every flag says why, in a sentence: the part it's short of, or how many days after its due date it is projected to finish.

Each morning the Overview shows those jobs grouped as Late, Blocked and At risk, most urgent first, and the same list can arrive by email. Whoever takes a job acknowledges or snoozes it, so nobody chases it twice.