Production, a capability you can own.

If you run a plant, you already know your production plan is not a document. It is a conversation. Sales takes orders by email, by WhatsApp and by word of mouth. The dispatch plan reaches the plant by phone. The plant makes what it can and answers the same way, and the answer is rarely written down.

At a maker of industrial packaging, orders are keyed in by the sales team from messages and calls, and material that has left a vendor but not reached the plant is not visible to anyone. At a textile finisher, the packing plan was a handwritten work order on a pre-printed form, with several programmes sharing one sheet. Nobody could see how far folding had got, so packing could not be planned on what was ready. At a building-materials manufacturer with many plants, head office learns what each plant has received, made and held by telephoning it.

In each of these the work gets done. What is not there is a single record that sales, the plant and head office can each read without asking someone.

Production is where your business differs most from the business next door: your recipes, your rejects, your units, the way a plan is agreed. A packaged production module covers what every plant has in common. It expects routings, work centres and standard times, and a plant that reports against them.

The trouble starts with the first thing it did not expect. A plant head who needs to say "180, not 200" and have sales read the reason. Cloth that is measured in metres until it becomes offcuts and is weighed. A plant that reports only finished output. In rented software each of these is a request to a vendor, placed in a queue behind other customers and decided by a roadmap you do not set. Meanwhile the floor goes back to the phone.

When the system is yours, the order is reversed. What gets built, and when, is your decision. The process changes on Tuesday, and so does the system.

Most software records what is. Phlo records what happened. In the system built for the packaging manufacturer, the next day's dispatch plan is drafted for each plant from the open order lines. Sales adjusts it and issues it. The plant head acknowledges it, or flags a line the plant cannot meet. A revision is a new version, and the earlier one stays.

A work order is raised against a plan line, the production run records good and rejected counts with the quality results, and dispatch commits stock at loading. The chain beside the headline is one such line, from the evening it was planned to the truck. Because every step is stored and none is overwritten:

• Trace. A dispatch carries the serial ranges it loaded. A work order carries its serials, its recipe version, the plan line it was raised against and the sales order behind it.
• Correct without overwriting. A revised plan is a new version and a new event. A stock adjustment is an event with a person and a reason code. The first figure is still there.
• Reports that draw on history. Planned against made, the lines flagged short and rejects by product can be drawn from the record, not compiled for a meeting.

Once the plan and the output are on record, the next process does not start from nothing. Purchasing can read what the plan will consume. Stock can read what production made. A second plant uses the same products, roles and reports. This extends without a migration: new processes sit on the history you already have.

After the first build the framework becomes available to you. Your own engineers and product people can build the next system on it, or we carry on building for you. Both stay open, and which you choose is settled in the first conversation, scoped to the engagement.

How the two stages workThe record that carries forward