Do you actually know what’s on your shop floor right now?

For operations and finance leaders in made-to-order manufacturing.

Ask a made-to-order manufacturer what’s on the shop floor at this moment and, too often, the answer isn’t immediate. Someone gets sent to look, or a supervisor gets called. The stock figure in the system may reflect last night’s update, or even last week’s. For a business that builds to order, that gap is where money quietly leaks.

The cost of not knowing

When you can’t see stock in real time, you manage by caution.

You hold more inventory than you need so a line never stops, which ties up cash. You still get caught out when a component you thought was in stock isn’t, and a build stalls. You write off material that was miscounted or quietly went missing. And you promise delivery dates you can’t fully stand behind. None of this shows up as a single line in the accounts, which is exactly why it persists.

Why it happens

Stock usually lives in several places at once: an ERP updated in overnight batches, a few spreadsheets and the knowledge in people’s heads. Movements get recorded after the event, not as they happen. This isn’t a failure of the team.

Most of these tools were built for periodic accounting, not for real-time execution on a busy floor, and the business has simply outgrown them.

Seeing the floor without walking it

This is the problem Footprints Warehouse was built to solve. It starts with a simple principle: every item is an asset, and every movement is an event worth recording.

Instead of relying on manual updates or end-of-shift paperwork, stock is captured at the point of work using a mobile device. As goods are received, moved, picked or consumed, the system updates immediately. The warehouse record reflects what’s happening on the shop floor, not what happened hours or days ago.

Production is driven directly from the bill of materials. As work progresses, the required components are consumed automatically, giving planners and supervisors an accurate picture of available stock without waiting for manual adjustments.

The platform compares expected and actual consumption in real time. If materials are overused, underused or missing, discrepancies are highlighted immediately, rather than remaining hidden until the next stocktake.

The result is simple. You know what you have, where it is and how it is being used without walking a single aisle.

What that looks like at scale

DIY Kitchens runs more than 25,000 SKUs on Footprints, with over 1.74 million warehouse movements recorded on the platform. As their Stock Controller, Teresa Mann, puts it: “You can click on a product and it tells you where it is. If you’ve got something on order it shows you the order number and how many. It makes things so much easier.” The point isn’t the size of the numbers. It’s that a made-to-order operation of real complexity now runs on live data rather than best guesses.

If you can’t answer the shop-floor question with confidence today, that’s the gap worth closing first.