Work-in-Progress Visibility: Knowing Where Every Job Stands
WIP is the least visible inventory in most factories — material that has left the store but is not yet product. Here is how to make it visible and why it pays.
Contents
Most manufacturers can tell you what is in the store and what is in finished goods. Ask what is between them — material issued to production but not yet a sellable product — and the answer gets vague.
That gap is work-in-progress, and in many plants it is the largest single pool of inventory nobody is watching.
Why WIP goes dark
The mechanics are ordinary. Material is issued to production, at which point it leaves the store's records. It becomes a product only when the batch is complete and enters finished goods.
In between — sometimes days, sometimes weeks — it exists physically on the floor but only informally in records. The supervisor knows. The whiteboard half knows. The office does not.
What that costs
Customer answers get worse. "Where is my order?" becomes a phone call to the floor, then a walk, then an estimate.
Planning gets defensive. When nobody knows how much is genuinely in progress, the safe response is to start more work — which increases WIP further and lengthens every queue.
Problems surface late. A batch stalled at step three for four days is invisible until someone asks about the delivery date.
Costing loses accuracy. Material consumed but not yet converted sits in an accounting no-man's-land, and month-end estimates fill the gap.
Capital hides. WIP is real money. When it is not measured, it is not managed.
The fix is smaller than it sounds
You do not need shop-floor terminals at every station. You need output recorded at each process step rather than only at the end of the batch.
That single change — process entries against a batch card — produces:
- A live position for every batch: which stage it has reached
- Remaining quantity per batch, so partial completions stay visible
- Yield per step, not just overall
- A timestamp trail that shows where time is actually being spent
What to record, and what not to
The temptation is to capture everything and end up capturing nothing, because the floor quietly abandons the paperwork. Keep it to what earns its keep:
| Record | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Quantity completed at each process | The core of WIP visibility |
| Quantity rejected, with reason | Feeds rejection analysis and yield |
| Which batch and work order | Ties everything back to a customer order |
| When | Reveals where jobs actually wait |
Anything beyond this should justify itself. An entry that takes a minute at each step will be sustained; a form that takes ten will not.
Making it stick on the floor
Three things determine whether process recording survives contact with a busy shift:
- The batch card is physical. Operators work against something printed; the system record follows the same structure, so there is no translation.
- Entry happens at the step, not at shift end. Recalled numbers drift, and the timestamps become meaningless.
- Somebody uses the data visibly. If the daily review references process entries, they get made. If nobody looks, recording quietly stops.
That third point is the one most implementations underestimate. Data collection survives only when the people collecting it see it being used.
The payoff
Once WIP is visible, a set of previously hard questions become trivial:
- Which jobs are stalled, and at which step?
- How much output is genuinely close to completion this week?
- Where does time actually go between process one and dispatch?
- Can we promise this customer a date, and defend it?
And one strategic question becomes answerable: are we starting more work than we finish? If WIP is growing while output is flat, the plant is accumulating unfinished value — a pattern that is obvious in the data and nearly invisible without it.
See batch cards and process entries producing live WIP — book a FlexgrewERP demo with a product of yours as the example.