Every metre counted once, from the mill's truck to the bale.

The client, a textile processing house, sells white cotton cloth to business buyers who take large orders. The cloth is dyed at outside mills and comes back to one finishing facility. There about 50 workers fold it, grade it, cut it and pack it into bales: cardboard boxes of folded cloth, each with a packing slip.

How it ran before

The factory floor worked on paper. Each truck arrived with the mill’s printed gate pass, and the arrival went into a register. Folding metres were reconciled against the mill’s metres in a notebook. The packing plan was a handwritten work order on a printed form, and the month’s packed bales were a handwritten list. Copies were carried to head office and entered into its own system.

Nobody could look up what stood at each stage. The manager checked the stock available for packing physically or from memory. Learning what a mill had in transit took a phone call.

What we built

Jetbro built the textile house’s finishing-floor system on Phlo. It follows the cloth from the mill’s truck to the dispatched bale: receipt, folding and measuring, classification, packing programmes, cutting, baling and dispatch, with the exceptions that run beside them.

Every piece carries a QR code printed from the system: a sticker on the lump (one piece of incoming fabric), a sticker on the thaan (one cut and folded piece), and the packing slip on the bale. Scanning uses the device’s own camera, and every scan screen also takes a typed number.

How a lot moves through it

Each gate pass becomes one MRL, the factory’s own lot number. It follows the cloth to dispatch.

1. Receipt. The supervisor records the gate pass: the mill, the arrival date, and for each of the mill’s lots the metres and lumps received per colour. Shrinkage against the greige, the undyed cloth sent out, is worked out. Nothing is measured at the gate.
2. Folding. A folding instruction sets the fold types and target metres. Workers fold and measure every lump. The supervisor records the factory’s own metres, and a sticker goes on the lump.
3. Classification. The operator scans each lump and gives it a tone and finish label, such as TF1.
4. Packing programme. The manager plans bales from the classified metres: brand, colour, customer, cut length and pieces per bale.
5. Cutting. Lumps are scanned onto the packing floor. The worker types the metres of each thaan as it is cut. A sticker prints for each one.
6. Baling. The system proposes how the thaans go into bales. The worker adjusts it and confirms. Each bale gets a number and a packing slip that carries its QR code.
7. Dispatch. The operator scans the bale, or ticks it in a list of packed bales, and confirms. The bale leaves stock.

What the first build described

A first build is where an operation gets written down: the things it tracks, what can happen to each of them, and the cases that do not fit.

The things the business tracks:

• A gate pass and its MRL. One truck’s paperwork from the mill becomes one MRL, numbered within the financial year.
• A lot. The mill’s own lot inside that gate pass, with the greige sent, the metres returned per colour, and the shrinkage between them. Metres are pooled per lot.
• A lump. One piece of incoming fabric, labelled by year, MRL, lot and sequence.
• A thaan. One cut and folded piece, with its metres and its grade. A thaan made of several parts is entered as parts and summed.
• A bale. A numbered box of thaans with a packing slip. A bale of offcuts has no thaans inside.
• A folding instruction, a packing programme and a bale setting. The three plans that tell the floor what to fold, what to cut for whom, and which thaans go into which bale.

What can happen to them, each recorded as an event:

• To an MRL and its lots: inbound received, inbound corrected, chadat recorded, put on hold, hold lifted, closed, reopened.
• To a lump: folding completed, classification recorded, lump utilised.
• To a thaan: thaan logged, thaan opened so its metres can be cut again.
• To a bale: bale setting created, bale setting appended on a later day, bale dispatched, bale dispatch undone, bale unpacked for todiya.
• To what is left over: offcuts logged by weight, offcut bale created, rejected metres logged and resolved.

The cases that do not fit the main flow were modelled, not worked around:

• Offcuts weighed, not measured. The lowest grades, fent, rags and chindi, are weighed, not measured. The system converts kilograms to metres with the lot’s chadat, its metres per kilogram, and they are baled separately.
• Rejected fabric. Metres found not acceptable are logged. Each entry is then resolved: packed as low grade, or entered on the return-to-vendor register.
• The wrong product in a batch. A lump of the wrong product is removed from the MRL, and either returned to the mill or split into a new MRL.
• Breaking a bale. Todiya means opening packed bales for a different buyer. The thaans go back to an unassigned pool. They are packed as a new bale, or opened and cut again.
• The wrong scan. An unknown, duplicate or already dispatched bale is refused at the scan, with a sound and a message. A dispatch made in error can be undone for a limited time, and the bale returns to packed stock.
• Goods that come back. A customer return is one of three kinds: a full bale, complete thaans, or partial metres. Thaans are restocked to the unassigned pool, and partial metres are credited back to the lot.
• A change of fold. Metres already on the packing floor can be moved from one fold type to another on the same lot.

Rules the system holds

A thaan’s grade is set from its metres, using thresholds held in the grade master. The worker can change it.

Low-grade material cannot be logged in kilograms until the lot’s chadat is recorded.

A thaan that is in a bale is never offered for another bale.

One gate pass always creates one new MRL. A folding instruction can be edited only until the first folding record exists against it.

Each permission is tied to an event type. A module appears in a user’s menu only if they may record its entry event. High-risk actions, such as removing a wrong-product lump, need a permission granted separately.

What the record makes possible

Stock is the events read as metres. The Inventory Metres view has ten stages, from received and folded to bales and samples. Each stage lists only the goods that have not moved on, so nothing is counted twice.

Every bale of thaans traces back. Its packing slip lists the thaans inside. Each thaan belongs to a lot, and each lot to the gate pass it arrived on. Searching for a thaan number finds its bale.

The gradation report for a lot is generated on demand: arrival metres, folding metres and packed metres, then metres and percentage in each grade.

What the foundation carries forward

The description above is the lasting part of a first build. The lot, the lump, the thaan and the bale are defined, with the events that move each one. Permissions are already tied to those events. Every receipt, cut and dispatch entered in the system stays on the record, in order.

A further process for a floor like this would start from that, not from an empty page. A further stage would read the same lots, thaans and bales, and add its own events to the same history.