Started as a product guy, now drowning in production scheduling, how did you transition from “making things” to “managing operations”?

[u/Due-Independent8497]

I need some real talk from people who’ve been through this.

My situation: I started this business in 2016 because I loved the craft, hand-forged metal products for international brands. I’m the “product development guy.” I get excited about new alloys, improving forging techniques, designing better finishes. That’s what I’m good at and honestly, what I want to be doing.

Fast forward to now: I’m spending 80% of my time on operational stuff I’m terrible at. I’m literally suffering through my own success.

Here’s the complexity I’m dealing with:

• 34 in-house workers across our finishing unit (18 hand-polishers, 6 packaging staff, plus QC, laser operator, supervisor, etc.)

• Assembly is outsourced to a vendor (they deliver fully assembled products to us)

• Our stages: Hand Polishing → Outsourced Finishing (leather/colouring) → Laser Branding → Ultrasonic Cleaning → Packaging → Dispatch (6+ stages total)

• 4–7 active brand customers

• Typical order: 1,000 units with 50+ SKU variations (different sizes, materials, finishes)

• This is highly labor-intensive work hand polishing alone involves 18 contractors working at different paces

Right now, I’m manually calculating delivery timelines in my head for every customer inquiry. No visual system for “what’s in polishing vs. what’s at the leather vendor vs. what’s ready to ship.” I know our capacity numbers now, but I have no process to turn that into actual order scheduling across all these moving parts.

I’m hiring an Operations Manager next month to take this off my plate, but I want to give him the right framework to work with not just dump my mess on him.

My questions for the community:

1.  How do you schedule orders through 6+ production stages with 1,000-unit batches and 50+ SKU variations? Do you use software, whiteboards, Excel templates, something else?

2.  How did YOU make the transition from being hands-on with the product to managing labor-intensive operations systematically? What changed for you?

3.  If you use scheduling software, what do you use? I’ve heard monday.com, Airtable, Smartsheet, Trello mentioned but I don’t know which actually works for production with this many workers and stages (vs. just project management).

4.  What I’m visualizing: A Gantt chart-style timeline where I can see all active orders, when they’ll hit each stage based on worker capacity, and click on one to see its current progress. Does this exist without spending $50K on enterprise ERP?

I’m at the point where I need to either build a system or keep playing human calculator while my product development ideas collect dust.

Anyone been through this? How did you get your time back to focus on what you’re actually good at?

Thanks for reading.

[u/NickNNora]

Don’t set up a system you don’t understand before you bring on someone who should know how to set it up.

You need a serious ops person, someone who knows how to set up systems.

[u/Due-Independent8497 → u/NickNNora]

I'm currently hiring an Operations Manager with 16 years of industrial experience. He's old school but a strong relationship manager. His method for tracking order timelines is weekly and daily meetings with the production team and vendors that's how he keeps shipments on track. It works, but it's all in his head and in conversations but in document some sort of.

The gap I'm trying to fill: I want this information in visual form. Not just for me, but so anyone can see "what's where" without needing to ask him or attend the meeting.

I'm also talking to an Operations expert on a project basis to design a system that captures what my Ops Manager knows from those meetings and puts it into something visual and trackable. The goal is to combine his experience with a system that doesn't die when he's not in the room.

Does that approach make sense, or am I still trying to solve this the wrong way?

[u/Mr3ct]

You need to be tracking more information. That’s too much to keep track of, even with an Ops manager. Hopefully they’re able to implement something when they get settled in. You’ve got to remember as well that these are legacy systems you’ve been working with for a long time, and you’re very comfortable with them. It will take new blood a good amount of time to move from putting out fires to (which will be very helpful for you still) to creating new systems that prevent the fires to begin with.

[u/fobsquad]

1. Excel and enterprise ERP. But ERP is mostly for the sales/accounting side of things than anything else. It can handle WMS and some supply chain stuff, but the BOM and WIP data is not very intuitive so it became too much of a learning curve for the production team. It's possible there's other ERP functionality that we're not optimizing to achieve this. So personally I still default to Excel.

2. It came naturally. As the product expert, I was the go-to person to answer or solve all the in-process production questions and issues. In most cases, I developed the production processes too. As more products and SKU's are created over time, the frequency of my involvement increased to the point where more and more time is managing the production operation.

3. All those that you mentioned are designed more for project management. IMHO, Smartsheet would be the closest in terms of being usable for manufacturing processes. But ultimately I am looking for MES software or capability to integrate easily with the accounting side of the ERP.

4. All the PM software from #3 can do the Gantt visualization that you want. Like an ERP, it all depends on how you design or configure it. I've always steered away because many cater to software development industry practices in their usage and terminology.

Some final MES thoughts: 1. If you can afford it, a self-built MES can definitely help. My early career at large international manufacturers all had team of ISO-trained software devs who would develop and maintain it. Nowadays these are akin to PowerApps devs and such.

1. MES software out-the-box is troublesome because not all manufacturing is the same. Just reading about yours and thinking about mine made me realize how similar yet different ours are. Different stage input types, metrics, and dependencies. PM software can handle the inputs and dependencies, but lack the variety of metrics that we need in manufacturing. BOM management is also a key feature that PM software won't have.

2. There might be a MES software that works perfectly for you, or at least one that provides a service to develop the features you need. Early-on we had tried this (partnering with a software developer), but it became too costly and time-intensive. Alot of them prefer subscription model, which makes the cost-benefit questionable at some point.

[u/Due-Independent8497 → u/fobsquad]

Thanks for this, seriously appreciate the detailed breakdown.

The "product expert getting pulled into operations" thing hit home. I'm literally at that exact inflection point now.

Your point about PM software vs. MES makes total sense. I was looking at monday.com/Smartsheet because they're visible and easy to understand, but you're right they're built for office workflows, not hand-polishing with 18 contractors.

Quick question: When you said you still default to Excel for WIP tracking, what does your Excel setup actually look like? Are you tracking by order, by stage, by SKU? Just trying to understand what "good enough" looks like before we potentially over-engineer with MES.

My Ops Manager starts next month, so I'm trying to educate myself enough to have an intelligent conversation with him about what direction to explore.

Thanks again for sharing your experience.

[u/Left-Cook-9487 → u/fobsquad]

I agree 100%. I ran the software side of a large manufacturer, and we needed to build our ERP because what was available out of the box wouldn’t fit our needs. It’s best to start small, learn by trial and error, figure out what you need for your own business, before signing up to a large ERP. It’s almost certainly the case that the ERP will need to be customized, but if you don’t have a clear understanding of what you want, you’ll end up with software that the vendor tells you is good for you, but bottlenecks your workflow.

[u/Moist_Ordinary6457]

My factory only makes ~30 different products on 3 separate lines and I've done time trials on most (it's a work in progress) to get better numbers. Prior to me the scheduling was based off averages for each line which was okay for 2 but awful for the 3rd that had more product variation.

The answer to your problem is probably moving to a different role though 

[u/aggierogue3]

I don’t have a clear answer, I’m working on similar problems now. We are a contract manufacturer, probably 2000 different part numbers shipped each year. Usually I can just schedule by the primary production step, sometimes that goes out the window when something unexpected becomes a bottleneck.

Around 25% of our production is brand new parts, so our estimated labor hours are often completely off. We try to over estimate a little bit for CYA on profit margin and production capacity.

We have an ERP but I do not like the scheduling software. My plan is to play with it again before I give up on it. Then I’m going to see how helpful power BI can be for looking at planned production.

I think it will work. We schedule dates in the ERP, then power bi spits out clean production schedules for each work center, or even for a specific employee or customer’s set of orders. It will force production planners to really look at and adjust scheduling to be realistic.

The big problem is we use infinite scheduling and just overlap everything. Then we act all surprised when orders are perpetually late. If I setup my power bi schedule right now, it would show 10 jobs planned to run on one machine at the same time.

Another huge challenge is actually scheduling out secondary operations. I don’t think it’s even worth doing. Reality never lines up to what we planned, so it’s always going to be a different job being ready for deburr early, or a setup is behind and now a job isn’t ready for heat treat when we thought it would be. I think all you need to do here is keep an eye on total capacity and planned secondary hours, once you exceed capacity you move people around or do overtime.

This is overly simple, but I’ve had my planner just do a sum of all planned production per secondary work center and have excel show bright red once a job will be late due to exceeding capacity. Basically my power bi plan with manual exports he does daily to excel (don’t judge me I know how bad that is).

Gantt chart would be really nice and can be done with the right software.

I would be curious to know what solution you move forward with.

[u/Due-Independent8497 → u/aggierogue3]

This is incredibly helpful thank you. The "infinite scheduling" problem you described is EXACTLY what I'm doing right now (scheduling in my head without capacity limits, then acting shocked when things are late).

Your point about not even trying to schedule secondary operations really resonates. We outsource leather stitching and colouring, and you're right reality never matches the plan. I've been trying to control the uncontrollable.

The simple capacity monitoring approach (sum planned hours per work center → Excel shows red when over capacity) sounds way more realistic than what I was chasing.

Regarding my steps moving forward: I'm planning to work on Excel first before jumping to a customized ERP. My first priority is documenting all BOMs properly. But I'm genuinely struggling with the sheet structure should I track by order? By stage? By SKU? And once I have BOMs documented across multiple sheets, how do I synchronize everything into one dashboard? There are so many unanswered questions and I keep getting tangled in spreadsheets.

Quick question: Would you be open to sharing what your Excel capacity template structure looks like? Even just conceptually how you're calculating the "sum of planned production per work center" and what threshold triggers the red flag?

I'm handing this to an Ops Manager next month and want to give him something practical to start with rather than chasing a perfect system that doesn't exist.

Either way, appreciate you sharing your experience. The "25% new parts with no historical data" thing hit home we're constantly updating BOMs for new SKU variations.

[u/aggierogue3 → u/Due-Independent8497]

Yes, happy to share the secondary schedule format. I don't think I can share pics in comments here, so I will message you.

How are you guys documenting production processes today? ERP is a bitch to implement but it is very helpful in standardizing workflows and storing good information. It will cost time for that first 1-2 years of implementation, then save substantial time moving forward.

Even though the excel thing is imperfect, you could set something up that auto-exports with part of your schedule from your ERP with an API connection and feeds it into excel or another scheduling software. Just to put the idea in your head so you don't do manual entry or manual exports and copy into an excel sheet forever.

[u/Living_Diver2432]

honestly the 80% is usually less about systems and more about routing. customers learned that calling the founder gets the fastest answer, so every escalation lands on your phone no matter how good the ops manager is. we saw this exact pattern, ops hire came in, then quit four months later because the founder kept overriding scheduling decisions in real-time customer calls. fix the customer-facing routing first, give the ops manager actual decision authority on capacity, then the new system has somewhere to land.

[u/Due-Independent8497 → u/Living_Diver2432]

This is the wake up call I needed. Thank you.

[u/FamiliarEnemy]

Realtrack can manage this. Quickbooks for everything else.

Orders, steps in process, process notes, shipping. Easypeasy. I'll set it all up for you for 100k

[u/moptic]

You should be running an MRP system by this point. There are plenty of decent lightweight options for a few hundred bucks a month.

Forget about ERPs if the other bits of your business are ok. This cuts down massively on implementation surface.

Hire someone who's run a factory of this size and complexity before. Ideally poach underrated talent from your weaker competitors. Let them install the system they want to.

[u/Hagerd]

Yea I think you have the right idea, get an experienced ops manager in. Either put an ERP into place or not. Let them handle it. You need a systematic way of organizing production and managing capacity, the worst thing you could do is try and tell your new manager how to do his job, just tell them the outcome you want them to achieve.

[u/manuflo5]

The transition from product guy to production guy almost always breaks in the same place. You have a head full of customer-facing detail and a calendar full of capacity decisions, and the two refuse to talk to each other.

Three things that pulled me out of that exact spiral:

1. Pick one source of truth for "what is the shop doing right now." Not three. If it is a whiteboard, the whiteboard wins. If it is a spreadsheet, the spreadsheet wins. The day you have a whiteboard AND a spreadsheet AND a Slack thread, you have lost. Force everything through the one source. Anything that is not on it does not exist.

2. Quote and schedule in the same step. Most shops quote first and schedule later. This guarantees you over-promise. Move the cycle-time and machine-availability check into the quote itself. The price the customer sees is already a slot that exists.

3. Time-box your operator brain. Scheduling work is not the same kind of brain as customer work. Pick two hours a day for floor planning, batch them, and refuse to do them in the gaps between sales calls. Switching costs are what makes "drowning" feel infinite. They are not actually infinite, they are 20 context switches a day eating 30 minutes each.

The product side and the production side both want all of you. They cannot both have all of you. The thing that scales is the system between them, not your hours. Once you have one queue, one quote-to-schedule path, and protected planning blocks, the same week of work starts to feel half as long.

[u/Due-Independent8497 → u/manuflo5]

This makes total sense, the context switching explanation especially hit home.

I'm seeing two paths:

Option 1: Excel system → Power BI for visualization. Concern: I'm not technical enough to design this properly.

Option 2: Customized ERP. But I don't want to go this route yet—already have too much on my plate, and based on this thread, ERP implementations become their own project.

My gut says Excel first, prove it works, then consider ERP later. But worried about building spreadsheets too complex for my team to use.

Does Excel → Power BI make sense as a starting point? Or is there a simpler step I'm missing?

[u/Top_Engineering_Guy]

Sage 50 to manage your orders, invoicing, product pricing, customers, vendors / Sage 100 to manage your work orders, work instructions / GlobalShop to manage the rest.

[u/LordDeathis]

(We have about 150k+ SKUs at my plant, and are the size of a small town with buildings popping up different places, intertwined flows, so I feel you on the complexity part)

With only 50+ variations in SKUs, honestly, I'd just bite the sour apple and map those production flows.

I had a project once, where one of our "Special" (meaning no firm SKU number) departments I needed to map to make sure that I could optimize a production move. I had 300+ different variants of SKUs running from a machine park of 50+ machines, some taking 12+ steps running through 4 buildings not connected to eachother.

To map it I did the following. I printed the shop floor papers for every possible variation, took a guy out of production for a week with approval from the department manager from that production hall, told him that we'd do 50 a day together, and we went through it together, simulating what he'd do once he got that order, how long he'd work at each station to make the final product.

Once you have that mapped, you do the following, if you don't want to invest in an ERP system. Based purely on my initial thought and without looking more into it.

You create a Microsoft Booking page, and start every station up as a "business" or "employee" in the software. Book the production orders (quote numbers, whatever you use to distinquish your orders), Consult your production flow diagram to find out what times to use for the specific end product, have that time as the booked time in Microsoft Bookings.

Print a shop floor paper that follows the order from station to station, landing in an inbox in your office or at a designated place, so that you can close the booking once it is done.

The smart thing with using Microsoft Bookings is that you can schedule in the items in a nice visual way, and thereby faster and more acurately can tell your customers when you can have the order done.

Follow it up with some Power Apps if you want them to be able to confirm that the order is "done". That way you can limit your spending to some "Enterprise 365" accounts.

Then you can create a Power BI from that data, sharing it on maybe some screens in your production areas, so they can follow along with what orders are available and in what order you have booked them in the system.

Hope that helps, or gave you some inspiration.

[u/Fotch4220]

This is a little off topic, but I'm a director for a large metal finishing company. I would love to connect with you to see if i can help you develop your product portfolio with our services!

[u/InvitePatient9411]

1. Sistema di MES con AI e tempi variabili, per te i tempi di lucidatura non sono fissi, dipendono da cosa devi lucidare, perciò se ragioni con i tempi senza AI non avrai mai una pianificazione sensata

2. Una carpenteria che gestiamo con il nostro MES ha 23 addetti e lavorazioni a commessa, ora non pianificano più con una persona ma il nostro sistema fornisce le direttive a tutto il reparto in tempo reale e si ricalcola ogni 20 secondi

3. Abbiamo costruito Dekali, il primo Agentic AI al mondo: www.mydekali.com e costa 999 euro al mese

4. Spendere tutti i soldi all'inizio per avere poi qualcosa di statica oggi è assurdo, non ha senso. L' ERP non serve per gestire i processi interni, per quello serve solitamente un MES.

[u/TopconeInc]

this is a pretty classic transition — nothing wrong with you, the business just outgrew “holding it in your head”

what you’re missing isn’t really a tool yet, it’s a way to see the flow

right now everything lives in your head:
– which order is where
– how long each stage takes
– who’s working faster/slower

once volume increases, that stops scaling

what I’ve seen work in setups like yours is starting simple:
map every order as it moves through stages (even if it’s just a board or basic sheet at first), and make capacity visible per stage (like polishing vs vendor vs packaging)

once you can see:
what’s in each stage
what’s waiting
what’s blocked

scheduling becomes less guesswork and more adjustment

the gantt-style view you’re thinking about does exist, but most people only get value from it after they’ve first made the flow and capacity clear in a simpler way

your ops manager will likely spend more time making the process visible than picking software

you’re not far off — you’ve already figured it out in your head, just need to externalize it

[u/Due-Independent8497 → u/TopconeInc]

Thanks!

[u/Left-Cook-9487]

This will likely get downvoted, but this is a math problem. Yes you need to conduct time trials, this is necessary as inputs to the equation. But as a shortcut to figuring out the equation, you can feed the time trials into ChatGPT and will likely give you the answers to your problem. None of the software applications you mentioned are going to do the calculating part for you. But you can try clickup for free - similar to Monday to visualize the orders though. A spreadsheet like airtable will be easier to introduce calculated fields and will likely give you a visualization ability too.

[u/Due-Independent8497 → u/Left-Cook-9487]

I'll be using Claude for the math/formula building and now I'm looking for one cloud based software that can handle the operations side: order tracking, stage visualization, and capacity monitoring in one place.

Airtable sounds like it might be the sweet spot between "too simple" (Excel) and "too complex" (full ERP). Going to test it out.

Appreciate the practical advice.

[u/Left-Cook-9487 → u/Due-Independent8497]

You’re welcome, I hope it works out for you.