A Work Order (WO) is a formal authorization to produce a specific quantity of an item by a deadline. It links the BOM, routing, material issue, labour, and machine usage, and becomes the system-of-record for production costing and completion.
Why It Matters
Without a work order, material issue is informal, production is untracked, and costing is guesswork. A proper WO gives planners visibility on WIP, gives stores a trigger to issue material against a number, and gives accounts a bucket to absorb labour and overhead. For Indian MSMEs moving from paper to ERP, the WO is the single most important shop-floor document.
Example with Indian Context
A pumps maker in Coimbatore opens WO-2026-0412 to produce 50 centrifugal pump casings. The system explodes the BOM and creates a material picklist, reserves 300 kg of CI scrap and 15 kg of graphite, schedules 4 hours on the moulding line, and prints a job card. The shop floor logs start time, machine, operator, and end time against this WO. At closure, actual material, labour, and overhead are all absorbed into the 50 casings produced.
Related Terms
How ERPDrive Handles It
ERPDrive creates work orders from sales orders, MRP runs, or manually. It auto-explodes the BOM, reserves stock, generates picklists and job cards, captures operator-wise timings through a tablet-friendly shop-floor UI, and closes with actual vs planned cost analysis.
See It in Your Factory
ERPDrive handles work orders as a first-class workflow alongside BOM, MRP, quality, and GST. Book a 30-minute demo.
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