One Report Instead of Five: Simplifying Production Reporting

One Report Instead of Five

How eight overlapping production reports became three that agree with each other.

Introduction

The company's earlier system carried a Daily Paver Production Register, a Daily Compound Wall Production

Register, separate variants of the latter for fencing posts and lego blocks, and individual monthly production

reports for pavers, compound walls and lego blocks.

All of them answered essentially the same question: what did we make, and what did it cost?

Problem Statement

1. Five reports, three different answers. Each report had been built separately, at a different time, so each calculated

things slightly differently. Damaged quantity was included in one and excluded in another. One averaged its rates while

another weighted them.

2. Disagreements were settled by asking which report was used. That is not a reporting system, it is a negotiation.

3. Every change had to be made five times. A request to add a column meant five separate changes, five tests, and

five chances to introduce a sixth inconsistency. In practice, two or three reports got updated and the rest drifted further

apart.

4. The real cause was fragmented data. Production for different product families was stored in different places, which is

precisely why five reports existed in the first place.

5. A single combined report risked being useless. Pavers need square feet, racks and pieces per square foot.

Compound walls need cubic metres, pieces and a length conversion in kilometres. Drain channels need pieces only. A

report covering all of them badly would have been worse than five covering each one well.

Solution Implemented

a. Production consolidated first. Because every product family now records production in one place — the SGP

Manufacturing Log — the justification for five separate reports disappeared entirely. The reporting problem was

solved by fixing the data, not by patching the reports.

b. Columns follow the selection. The rule set was that the report shows only the columns the selected item

groups actually use. Selecting one product family gives a view indistinguishable from a report built only for it.

Selecting several gives the combined view with group headers. One report that never looks like a compromise.

c. A single Daily Production Register. One row per production run for pressed products, one row per item for

cast products, with per-item totals and a grand total. It includes the length-in-kilometres conversion the site team

needs for one particular slab product — which previously required a report of its own.

d. An Itemwise Monthly Production Report. Every item, every month, grouped by item group with subtotals

and a grand total. It shows raw material cost per unit, each individual costing component, the overhead share,

labour and operator cost, and the total. This is the report used for pricing reviews.

e. A Monthly Production Report. The same ground from the opposite direction: take an item group and show its

full cost build-up — every raw material with quantity, rate, amount and unit conversions, then each costing

component, then a complete expense breakdown that drills down to individual documents.

f. Shared definitions across all three. The list of item groups, each group's unit of measure and each group's

costing components are defined once and used by all three reports. It is now structurally impossible for them to

disagree about what a product family is or how it is measured, because there is only one copy of that definition.

Outcomes & Benefits

✓ Eight reports were replaced by three that cover strictly more ground.

✓ The five conflicting daily registers became one, so there is a single production figure.

✓ A change requested once is made once, and is immediately consistent everywhere.

✓ Selecting a single product family still gives the exact focused view users were used to.

✓ Cost per unit, overhead share and labour cost appear together in one row for pricing decisions.

✓ Every cost figure in the monthly report drills down to its source documents.

✓ Reports can no longer drift apart, because they share their underlying definitions.