How to track work-in-progress on your shop floor without Excel

Ask most factory owners how many pieces are sitting between drilling and threading right now, and the honest answer is "let me check". Someone walks the floor, counts trays, or calls the supervisor. By the time the number arrives, it has already changed.

That number is your work-in-progress (WIP): pieces that have started production but are not finished yet. It is the single best signal of where your factory is slowing down. This post explains why the usual ways of tracking it fail, and a simple hourly method that works even in a small workshop.

Why the register and the Excel sheet tell you too late

Most shops track production in one of three ways:

• A register at each station. Operators write counts at the end of the shift. Someone totals them the next morning.
• An Excel sheet in the office. The supervisor types in the register numbers once a day, if there is time.
• A WhatsApp group. Photos of slips and "how many done?" messages through the day.

All three have the same problem: the information is a day old and scattered. You find out a stage was stuck yesterday, after the order is already late. And nobody adds up WIP stage by stage, because doing it by hand takes too long.

What you actually need to know

You don't need a complicated system. For each product, you need three numbers per stage:

1. Received: how many pieces have reached this stage.
2. Done: how many passed this stage (good pieces) and how many were rejected.
3. Waiting: received minus done minus rejected. This is the WIP at that stage.

The stage with the most pieces waiting is your bottleneck. That is where an extra operator, a second shift on one machine, or a quick fix to a tool pays off the most.

A simple hourly method

Here is a method you can start tomorrow, on paper or in software:

1. List your stages in order for each product. For example, a pipe handle might go: cutting, bending, flattening, drilling, chamfering, threading, buffing.
2. Make every batch a lot with a number and a planned quantity (we cover this in lot tracking for small factories).
3. Every hour, each station writes two numbers per lot: good pieces and rejected pieces.
4. Pieces that pass a stage become "received" at the next one. So the only thing anyone enters is what they finished.
5. Look at "waiting" per stage a few times a day. Where the number keeps growing, act.

The key is the hourly rhythm. An hour is short enough that problems show up the same day, and long enough that operators are not interrupted all the time.

Where paper breaks down

The hourly method works on paper for one or two products. It breaks down when:

• you run several products with different stages at the same time,
• one order is split across several lots,
• you want to see the numbers without walking the floor,
• you need to know who entered a count when something looks wrong.

At that point the adding up becomes the bottleneck. This is exactly the work software should do for you.

How LineSight does it

LineSight follows the same method. Operators open the entry screen on their phone, pick their station, and type good and rejected pieces for each lot waiting there. LineSight moves the good pieces to the next stage automatically and keeps the "waiting" number for every stage up to date.

The live dashboard shows each product with its stages in order, how much is waiting at each one, what was done and rejected today, and a Bottleneck tag on the stage with the biggest pile. It refreshes every 30 seconds, so the owner, the supervisor and the office all see the same numbers.

The takeaway

You can't fix a slowdown you can't see. Count good and rejected pieces at every stage, every hour, and keep a live "waiting" number per stage. Whether you do it on paper or with a tool, that one habit tells you where your factory is stuck, today instead of tomorrow.