Use case
Where is order 2417? Answered — without walking the floor.
Timill tracks every production order through your phases, live. The whiteboard, the Excel plan, and the "quick status round" become one shared view — from sales confirmation to delivery.
The daily archaeology of "where is it?"
- The order book is in Excel, the schedule on a whiteboard, the real status in the foreman's head.
- Sales promises delivery dates without seeing the actual load on the floor.
- A rush order jumps the queue — and three other orders slip without anyone deciding it.
- The Monday status meeting exists to answer one question the system should answer for free: where is everything?
- An ERP or MES would do this — after a year of implementation and a budget you don't have. And you'd still model your process into their structure.
The configuration
How it works in Timill
Item types
Production Order
Customer, part/product, quantity, order date, promised delivery, current phase (e.g. Queued → Material → Machining → Welding → Surface → Assembly → QC → Ready → Delivered — your phases, whatever they are), priority, linked drawings and documents, notes.
Customer
Contacts, order history.
Non-Conformance (optional)
Pairs with the quality use case — deviations linked to the order they occurred on.
Links that create the trail
Order → customer, order → drawings, order → deviations. Everything about order 2417 is on order 2417 — including the discussion, so "check the email thread" dies.
Automations
Phase changed to Ready → sales notified. Promised date approaching with order still mid-flow → flag it. New order from a form or import → straight into the queue.
From the floor
The person finishing a phase moves the order forward from a phone or terminal. Ten seconds; the whole company sees it.
What each role sees
Floor (board)
Orders by phase — a live whiteboard everyone can trust.
Production manager (dashboard)
Load per phase, late and at-risk orders, this week's deliveries.
Sales (dashboard)
Every customer's orders and real status — answers without calling the floor.
Owner
Throughput and on-time delivery trend.
A day with it
- 08:00
No status meeting. The board already says what changed since Friday.
- 10:30
Customer calls sales about order 2417. Sales looks: in Surface treatment, on track for Thursday. Answered in 10 seconds, no phone relay to the floor.
- 13:00
A rush order comes in. The production manager sees phase load before promising anything — and when it jumps the queue, the two orders that slip are flagged, not discovered.
Who this fits
Common in: machine shops, metal fabrication, make-to-order manufacturers, joineries, electronics assembly — 10–100 people, order book in Excel, not ready (or willing) to buy an ERP project.
Why Timill and not…
Excel + whiteboard
No live status, no history, no link between the order and its documents, deviations, and discussion.
ERP/MES
The right tool at a different scale and budget; most shops this size use a fraction of it and bend their process to fit.
Generic project tools
A production order with phases, drawings, and QC is not a "card on a board." Define the real object instead.
Pairs naturally with the non-conformance and maintenance configurations — one platform for the whole shop, added step by step.
Our founder ran production coordination at a Finnish industrial company — this configuration is that experience, productised.
From the floor
Live on every dashboard
Questions
Our phases are unusual.
Good — phases are fully yours. Timill has no fixed production model.
Can sales enter orders?
Yes — directly, via forms, or by importing from spreadsheets.
Is this an ERP?
No, deliberately. No accounting, no MRP. It's the live coordination layer most shops are missing. REST API available for connecting other systems.
How fast can we start?
A configuration like this one is typically live in days; we build it with you and refine as you use it.
On-premises?
Yes, Docker-automated on-prem deployment is supported.
See your order book, live
Bring your current Excel order list to a 30-minute call — we'll show what it looks like as a live board with your phases.