The plan, the plant and the truck, on one record.

The client is an industrial packaging manufacturer. It makes packaging in three families: plastic drums, mild-steel barrels and intermediate bulk containers (IBCs). Sales and purchasing sit at head office. The system models head office and two manufacturing units.

The operation, and what it needs to see

The daily question is what has to leave each unit tomorrow, and whether the unit can make it. Answering it needs the open orders, the finished stock, the material on hand and the material still on the road in one place.

The record of the earlier state is short. Sales orders reach the sales team by email, by WhatsApp and verbally. The plan for what each unit should dispatch has to travel from head office to the plant. Material bought for the units travels by road, and a consignment that has left the vendor and not yet reached a unit is not visible anywhere.

What we built

Jetbro built one system on Phlo that spans procurement to dispatch, with production in the middle: indent, purchase order, inbound consignment, goods receipt, stock, sales order, daily dispatch plan, work order, production run, dispatch and trip.

Every change of state is stored as an event. The screens are views rebuilt from those events.

How the work moves through it

1. Indent and purchase order. The plant raises a purchase indent, an internal request with a quantity and a reason on each line. Head office approves or rejects it. An approved indent becomes a purchase order to one vendor, and several indents can be combined into one order.
2. Material on the road. Each inbound consignment is recorded with its carrier, tracking reference and quantity, and moves through five stages from dispatched to received. Time in each stage is shown.
3. Goods receipt. The store records what arrived, with a quality status on each line. Posting the receipt updates stock and the purchase order together.
4. Sales order. Sales keys the order with its customer, consignee and a delivery schedule. A line can be split across dates and across units.
5. Dispatch plan. The system drafts tomorrow’s plan for each unit from the open schedule lines and shows free finished stock against each line. Sales adjusts the plan and issues it.
6. Today’s plan. The plant head sees the issued plan and acknowledges it, or flags a line the plant cannot meet.
7. Work order. Production raises a work order against a plan line. The bill of materials is exploded against real stock, and a shortfall table shows what is missing before release.
8. Production run. The operator enters good and rejected counts, the quality result and the leak test. The system computes material consumption from the bill of materials, lets the operator overwrite the actuals, and shows the variance.
9. Dispatch and trip. The dispatcher confirms what was loaded against the plan and attaches serial ranges from units that passed quality. One event deducts finished stock, updates the sales order and generates the delivery challan and the outbound lorry receipt. A truck and driver are assigned to a trip, which cannot be completed until proof of delivery is recorded.

What the first build described

A first build leaves a description of the operation: the things it tracks, what can happen to each, and the cases that do not follow the tidy path.

• The things tracked. Items, split into finished goods and raw materials. The bill of materials, a versioned recipe tree for each product. Vendors and customers. The indent, the purchase order, the inbound consignment and the goods receipt. The sales order and its schedule lines. The daily dispatch plan, one for each unit and date. The work order, the production run and the serial. The dispatch, the trip, the vehicle and the driver.
• What can happen on the buying side. An indent is created, approved, rejected or converted into an order. An order is sent, acknowledged, closed or cancelled. A consignment is recorded, goes in transit, arrives at the carrier’s facility, is collected and arrives at the plant. A receipt is created, and can be flagged for review.
• What can happen to the plan. It is redrafted, a line is adjusted, it is issued, acknowledged, flagged short and revised.
• What can happen on the floor and at the gate. A work order is created and released. Raw material is consumed. Production is completed. Serials are generated. Regrind is returned. A dispatch is created. A trip changes status, and proof of delivery is received.
• Exception: the plant cannot meet a line. The flag carries a reason and the quantity the plant can deliver. Sales revises the plan, which raises its version and clears the acknowledgement, so the plant acknowledges again.
• Exception: lines compete for the same stock. The plan warns, and works out the total that must be made.
• Exception: a recipe four levels deep. The IBC recipe runs from coil through pipe, cut piece and cage to the finished container. The work order lists required material level by level, and a material used on more than one line is merged into one row.
• Exception: rejected plastic is not waste. Flash and rejected drums are granulated and return to regrind stock as part of posting the run. Steel rejects are counted as rejected and do not return to stock.
• Exception: a consignment with no purchase order. It is still shown. A stage may be skipped, with a warning, but stages only move forward.
• Exception: a wrong timestamp. A stage time on a consignment can be corrected with a reason. The original and the correction are both kept.

The rules the system holds

A bill of materials is versioned. Editing one creates a new version, and the version is pinned to a work order at release, so a later recipe change does not rewrite what was already made.

An indent rejected at head office needs a written reason, which the plant sees, and a rejected indent is not reopened. A goods receipt outside the quantity tolerance is flagged for review.

Stock is committed when a dispatch is loaded, not when an order is confirmed. One dispatch goes to one consignee. A stock adjustment needs a reason code and is stored as a permanent, attributed record, not as an edit.

What the record makes possible

Every good unit gets a serial in the client’s own numbering. Serials are generated when a production run is posted, the run belongs to a work order with its recipe version pinned, and a dispatch records the serial ranges it loaded.

A purchase order opens into its own trail: the indent that asked for it, the consignment that carried it and the receipt that posted it to stock. The plan works the same way. Who issued it, who acknowledged it and which line was flagged short are events with a time and a person.

What the foundation carries forward

This build already holds the masters most later systems would need: items, recipes, vendors, customers, units, vehicles and drivers. It holds the approval step between plant and head office, and it stores every change to stock, orders and plans as an event.

Every Phlo system is built on the same framework. A further system for the same operation would reuse these masters and approvals and read the same event record, without a migration.