In many small and mid-sized manufacturing companies, traceability often swings between two extremes. On one side, there's the shop that tracks nothing: no work-in-progress updates, no real production logs, not even timestamps. On the other, there’s the company that tries to track every move: when someone clocks in on a task, when they clock out, which part of the process they touched, and what they had for lunch. Neither approach works particularly well. The first leads to chaos; the second to burnout and bad data.
The problem is easy to spot when you're close to the shop floor. Without any tracking, planning becomes guesswork. You might think a process takes 15 minutes because someone once said it should, but is that really true? Most teams we talk to are surprised when they start measuring and find out how far off their assumptions were. That lack of information creates ripple effects: inaccurate lead times, incorrect pricing, missed deadlines, and overworked teams trying to hit targets based on flawed expectations.
When a shop doesn't know how long things take, it can’t accurately quote jobs. This leads to underestimating time and cost, and then absorbing losses without knowing where they came from. Some companies try to make sense of it by comparing monthly profits, but that rarely tells the whole story. Which customers are actually profitable? Which jobs tend to overrun? Which process should you expand, or maybe outsource? Without data from the floor, it's just speculation.
And then there's capacity. If you don’t know what’s currently on the floor or how much work is in progress, how can you promise anything new to a customer? Too often, fixed lead times are used as a fallback — “We always quote three weeks” — even when the actual load might justify one or five weeks. This leads to pressure, shifting priorities, and broken trust when the real delivery date doesn’t match what was promised.
Paper tracking isn’t much better. Shops where workers write down order numbers and times on scraps of paper, which are later typed into a spreadsheet by someone else. Aside from the time wasted, it’s hard to read messy handwriting, and errors pile up. A big reason this happens is that many ERP systems charge per user, which discourages companies from giving access to everyone who needs it. Even if a shop worker only uses the system for five minutes per shift, those five minutes might contain the most valuable insights of the day.
Of course, once a company realizes it needs to track operations, there’s a risk of going too far. We’ve seen systems that require workers to scan at the beginning and end of every task. The idea sounds good on paper, but in practice, people forget to scan. Then someone in the office has to “fix” the data, which becomes a full-time job on its own. Worse, the system ends up filled with timestamps that are technically correct but completely useless. No one actually needs to know that a part was finished at exactly 2:43 PM last Friday — what matters is how long it took and how many were made.
The key is to track only what matters. In most fabrication shops, that means recording how many units were completed and roughly how long they took. That’s usually enough to understand real productivity, improve planning, and get a handle on cost. It also respects the operator’s time. No one wants to stop every few minutes to input data, and they shouldn’t have to. If tracking is intuitive, workers will use it consistently. If it’s complicated or bureaucratic, they’ll find ways to avoid it — and who can blame them?
At Nengatu, we’ve taken a different approach. Our team comes from manufacturing, and we know what actually happens on the floor. We designed our system so that it’s easy for employees to record basic production data without slowing down their work. We don’t charge per user; we charge per simultaneous access. This gives shops the flexibility to involve everyone without overpaying, and keeps tracking simple and scalable. No need to chase every detail — just get the right data, and let it work for you.
Traceability doesn’t have to mean layers of red tape. With a practical approach and a system that understands the shop floor, manufacturers can get real insights, improve decisions, and reduce stress — without turning their operations into an administrative maze. It’s about balance, and in our experience, that balance starts with simplicity.