Apparel Production Tracking System

Objective: Get production out of the spreadsheet

A licensed apparel manufacturer tracked every order through production in one enormous spreadsheet: purchase orders, styles, quantities by size, factories, sample dates, and ship dates. Product teams, production artists, managers, and overseas factories all worked from it. Columns got overwritten, nobody could tell who changed what, and every factory could see every other factory’s orders.

The company asked Web Ascender to replace the spreadsheet with a web application that felt just as fast to work in, but knew who was allowed to change what.

What Web Ascender Did

• Discovery and wireframes - started on-site with the team’s real spreadsheet, then worked through wireframes with stakeholders in the US and overseas
• A spreadsheet-fast grid - orders and line items in one screen, with sticky headers, per-column filters, search, sorting, adjustable page sizes, rearrangeable columns, and saved views
• Imports from Excel - multi-sheet workbooks processed in the background with a live progress bar, every error listed before anything is saved, email notifications, and an undo for a bad import
• Column-level permissions - roles for production art, product managers, observers, WIP managers, and factories, each with its own set of columns to view and edit, managed from an admin screen
• Factory access - each factory sees only its own orders, adds notes, and exports only its own data
• Bulk editing - select a range of cells and update them in one step, with validation on every change
• Calculated dates - production and pre-production sample due dates filled in automatically from the rest of the schedule
• Activity feed - a full change history, searchable by purchase order and exportable to Excel
• Excel export of any view
• Hosting and support - production servers with off-site backups, ongoing column and permission changes as the business evolved, and read-only database access for the company’s reporting tools

The Outcome

The production schedule moved from a file everyone was afraid to touch to a system where each team and factory had its own view, and every change had a name and a timestamp next to it. It’s the work we do for manufacturers whose operations have outgrown a spreadsheet.

The header photo is representative stock photography and the illustration uses sample data, not the actual system. The client is not named.