Which orders can you actually build today?

Forty orders are paid and waiting. The shelf has fabric, zippers, and labels on it. Which of those orders can you make today?

The obvious way to answer is one at a time: open an order, read what it needs, check the shelf, mark it buildable. Do that forty times and you get a list that is wrong.

It’s wrong because the orders aren’t independent. Two orders each need 3 m of the same fabric and there are 4 m on the shelf. Checked separately, both are buildable. Checked honestly, one is.

One pool, in ship-by order

Orders → Build schedule evaluates every unfulfilled, paid order against a single pool of component stock. It sorts by ship-by date, soonest first, then walks the list – each order takes what it needs out of the pool, and the next order sees what’s left. The order due Friday gets the fabric before the order due next month.

That one detail is the whole difference between a list of orders that could each be built and a list of orders that can all be built.

Three answers

• Ready now – every component it needs is on the shelf.
• Scheduled – something is short, but enough is arriving to cover it, and the date says when.
• Blocked – even counting everything already on order, a component stays short.

Where the dates come from

Scheduled orders get their date from stock that is already on its way: open purchase orders, and purchase invoices you haven’t received yet. Arrivals are consumed in ETA order exactly the way shelf stock is, so a delivery that covers one order’s shortfall is no longer available to cover the next one’s.

The date on an order is the latest of the deliveries it’s waiting for, not the first. Three of the four things you need is still nothing you can build.

Reading it top to bottom

The page groups everything into buckets: ready today first, then one bucket per date, then the orders waiting on stock with no ETA, then the blocked ones. Each row carries the order, its ship-by date, who it’s assigned to, the items still outstanding, and what it’s waiting on – “short 2.5 m, arriving 18 September” rather than a red dot you have to go interpret.

The counting rules we settled on

• Finished stock counts first. If the variant is already built and sitting in the warehouse, the order takes it from there and consumes no components at all.
• Nothing gets built twice. Units already produced against an order are subtracted before the schedule asks for anything else.
• Only what’s still outstanding. A partly shipped order counts what’s left: ordered, minus refunded, minus already fulfilled.
• No recipe means blocked, not ready. An order with units to build and no Bill of Materials to build them from can never become ready, so the schedule doesn’t pretend it might.
• One unknown ETA moves the whole order. If any delivery covering an order has no ETA, the order drops to the no-date bucket instead of showing a date we don’t believe.
• Assembly happens in one place. Components are counted in your main warehouse, because that’s where things actually get built.

What it changed for us

The morning used to start with someone walking to the shelf holding a printed list, and it ended with a good guess. Now it’s a page: what we’re making today is the top bucket, and what we’re making next is the one under it.

The blocked orders are the useful part, though. They sit at the bottom of the same screen, already saying which component is short and by how much – which is usually a purchase order that should have gone out a week ago.