WIP Location & Quantity Tracker

The problem this kills

Half-finished product is the easiest inventory to lose. A tote of WIP gets staged behind the press, moved to QC hold, then parked near shipping - and nobody wrote it down. By Friday the count on the floor doesn't match the count in your ERP, a job gets re-run because someone thought the parts vanished, and the same WIP gets counted twice in two locations.

The usual "fix" is a clipboard, a whiteboard, or a shared spreadsheet that three people edit at once. None of them tell you, right now, how much of which job is sitting where - and none of them stop a handler from "moving" 200 pieces out of a location that only has 80.

This tool gives you a single, trustworthy picture of WIP on the floor: every move is recorded with job, quantity, from-location and to-location; the system refuses impossible moves; a supervisor approves anything that touches valuation or moves a big quantity; and you can hand finance a clean snapshot CSV any time they ask.

What you'll build

A small, private web app for your shop floor:

• A move screen where a material handler picks (or scans) a job/lot, enters a quantity, and chooses where it's going. The tool checks the from-location actually has that many before it lets the move through.
• A live WIP board showing current quantity by location, by job - plus how long each pile has been sitting there (WIP age), so stale piles jump out.
• An approval queue where flagged moves (big quantities, valuation-affecting changes) wait for a supervisor's thumbs-up before they post.
• A one-click WIP snapshot export in the exact columns your finance or ERP people expect.

No integration to your existing system? No problem. The plan includes a fallback that imports your jobs and locations from a Google Sheet or CSV and exports the snapshot CSV - so you can run the whole thing today.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single markdown file you paste into Claude Code (a free AI coding assistant). It walks the AI through building the whole tool, step by step, with a ready-to-copy prompt at the end of each step.

It opens by interviewing you about your business. Before it writes a line of code, the plan makes the AI ask about your real process - what your work centers and staging areas are actually called, how your jobs and lots are numbered, your typical and peak move volumes, which moves need a supervisor, and your messy edge cases (scrap, splits, QC holds). It reflects a short spec back to you for a thumbs-up, then tailors the data model and every later step to your shop - not a generic template.

You'll also get: the exact data model, the validation rules that block impossible moves, the duplicate guard, the approval gate, the audit trail, and the CSV import/export fallback.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy. The plan builds in the controls that make a tool safe to actually run your floor on:

• Login so only your team can open it.
• Row-level security so each plant/org only ever sees its own WIP.
• A complete audit trail - who recorded which move, who approved it, and exactly when.
• A human-in-the-loop approval gate - flagged moves are drafts until a supervisor approves; only then do they post to the WIP picture.
• Duplicate guards - the same move (job/lot + timestamp) can't be recorded twice.
• Move validation - you can't move out more than a location actually holds.

Who it's for

Material handlers, line supervisors, and inventory controllers in any shop that moves work-in-process between stations - machine shops, assembly lines, food and consumer-goods production, contract manufacturing. If you can describe your floor and fill in a spreadsheet, you can build this.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the AI interview you.