It planned each day's bake on a whiteboard and reordered on gut feel. This is a day on Opser, where an operator reads the standing orders, demand history, and shelf life, and has the plan ready before anyone clocks in.
The bakery supplied cafes and grocers on standing wholesale orders, baking fresh each day against a short shelf life. Production and reordering were a judgment call made each morning: overproduce and product was written off, underproduce and a standing order went short.
Lots and expiry lived on paper. When a grocer asked for an allergen trace on a batch, it took two people half a day to reconstruct it from handwritten sheets. Orders arrived in a shared inbox, and every delivery was re-keyed into QuickBooks, with returns and credits reconciled by hand on the weekly invoice.
From the next day's standing orders and the same week last year, the operator drafts the production plan and queues it for the head baker to approve.
The approved plan is on the floor. Any ingredient below its reorder point already has a draft purchase order waiting for a yes, so nothing stalls the bake.
Each delivery posts to the customer's weekly invoice with returns and credits applied automatically, instead of a half-day re-keying into QuickBooks. The operator flags any lot nearing expiry so it sells first, and any batch traces in seconds.
When a grocer moved its order cutoff earlier, the owner described the new rule in plain language and it shipped that afternoon. No developer, no ticket.
Overdue AR is chased on the schedule finance set, and margin by product and customer is already in the dashboard, with no spreadsheet to rebuild.