Getting customer approvals back to the factory before manufacture

A drawing goes to your customer for approval, and it comes back approved. On instrument and valve work that is not the end of the cycle.

The factory building the item, your sub-supplier, is waiting on that approval before it releases manufacturing. Until the approval reaches them, nothing has changed on the shop floor. That last leg is a plain forwarding step, it belongs to nobody in particular, and it is the step that can get forgotten.

When it is missed, nothing is overdue in the direction anyone is watching. The customer has done their part, your tracking says approved, and the factory is not building. It surfaces later as a delivery date that has moved, and the questions start: was the approval sent, to whom, and when.

For reps and distributors the forwarding step is their whole position in the flow. They sit between a customer who approves and a principal who builds, on many orders at once and across several lines, each with its own approvals to pass on.

The step holds when it is part of the cycle rather than something someone remembers. Make the release to the sub-supplier a stage with the same standing as the approval itself, and the cycle is not complete until the approval has gone onward: it cannot be skipped quietly, nobody has to carry it in their head, and there is a record of when it went.

In DocBoss it is a stage in the document’s workflow. The customer’s return arrives and takes its status, and the onward release to the sub-supplier is the next stage, sitting in the action queue until it is done. The submittal to the sub-supplier is tracked like any other send, so the record shows when the approval came in and when it reached the factory. It works the other way as well: a sub-supplier’s own fabrication can be held until the documents it owes you are approved.

The step is simple, easy to forget, and on the critical path. Those three together are why the system should be the one carrying it.