Manufacturing orders

A manufacturing order is one unit of production: build this much of this thing, at this location. Where a bill of materials says how something is built, a manufacturing order says this one is being built now.

Where they come from

Most manufacturing orders are made-to-order. They’re attached to a line on a customer’s Shopify order, because something has to be produced before that line can be fulfilled. Two things cause that:

• Someone bought a made-to-order product, and it has to be built from its bill of materials
• Someone bought a customisable product and personalised it, so the line carries an attribute that matched one of your customisation intents

The second kind has no materials to consume. The work is the engraving or the embroidery, not the assembly, so the order carries the instruction instead of a list of inputs.

The rest are build-to-stock, attached to no customer order at all. You’re building ahead, usually a component that goes into something else later.

Only made-to-order production reaches back into Shopify. Flow triggers, the block on the order page, and the badge in customer accounts all report against a customer’s order, and a build-to-stock order doesn’t have one to report against. Those stay inside Orderkraft.

One order line can have more than one manufacturing order. That happens when production is split, for example across two locations. The combined output of those orders can’t exceed what the customer actually bought.

Statuses

A manufacturing order is always in exactly one of six statuses:

Status changes are made in Orderkraft. The Shopify order page, customer accounts, and Flow only read them.

Holds

Putting an order on hold records a note explaining why: waiting on a fabric delivery, a machine down, a customer changing their mind mid-build. An order can carry several holds at once, and each one is released separately. The order goes back to production when the hold is lifted.

Holds are the part of production that support usually has to chase, so the note travels with the status. It shows on the manufacturing order detail view in Shopify, which means whoever answers the customer can read the reason without asking the floor.

The timeline

Every status change is recorded as an event with a timestamp and, where there was one, the person who made it. Read top to bottom, the timeline is the production history of that order: when it was created, when it started, every hold and release, and when it finished.

How statuses roll up to an order line

Customers don’t see manufacturing orders. They see the item they bought. So when a line has manufacturing orders behind it, Orderkraft reduces them to a single status for that line.

If there’s only one manufacturing order, the line reports its status. If there are several and they disagree, the line reports the one furthest along, labelled as partial: a line with one order still queued and one already in production reads as Partially in progress.

The order of progress is:

1. Cancelled
2. Draft
3. Waiting
4. In progress
5. On hold
6. Completed

Cancelled ranks lowest on purpose. A cancelled manufacturing order alongside a live one shouldn’t make the line look cancelled when something is still being built for it.

Lines with no manufacturing orders behind them don’t report a status at all. That’s every stocked item that nobody has to touch before it ships. A stocked item that was engraved does report one, because something is being produced for it.

Where you see them

• In Orderkraft, as the full production queue with search, filters, and the actions that change status
• On the Shopify order page, as a block listing the manufacturing orders for that order
• In customer accounts, as a status badge on each line item
• In Shopify Flow, as triggers that fire on each status change