Forty-nine problems a SyteLine shop lives with, and what closes each one
Every entry is a problem in the words a manufacturer uses, not a feature in the words a vendor uses. Each one names how it shows up, why it stays unanswered when your systems are separate, and what changes. Filter by your role to find yours.
The four questions that come up in almost every conversation Lake has with a plant, and cannot be answered by one system alone.
We quoted 30 percent margin and delivered 28. Where did the two points go?
How it shows upThe job closes, the controller rebuilds actuals after the period ends, and the number is different from the quote. Nobody can say which operation, which shift, or which rework cycle took the difference.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateLabor is keyed late or in batches, machine time is never captured at all, scrap lives in a spreadsheet, and rework has no cost of its own. The three numbers you would have to lay against each other were never on the same record.
What changesThe answer spans labor at the station, machine time and the job cost in SyteLine. Shop-Trak puts labor on the job the day it happens, Machine-Trak reads machine time from the machine, and Fact-Trak shows the standard, the actual and the gap. Three sources, or one record. Machine time reaches the job through the Shop-Trak link, expected by the end of 2026.
Is the machine shop carrying its own weight?
How it shows upYou can see that the machines ran. You cannot see what they earned. Capacity decisions, overtime decisions and capital decisions get made on a feeling because the measurement arrives after the decision.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateUptime lives in one tool, labor in another, and maintenance cost in no system at all. The weekly review is a manual correlation done by hand, a week late, by the one person who knows how to build it.
What changesThe answer spans machine utilization, the labor booked against it and the cost of both. Machine-Trak gives you measured utilization by cell with the lost time behind it, and eScore puts a cost on machine time by asset. Three sources, or one record.
Will this order ship on time, and if not, which one do I bump?
How it shows upThe schedule says one thing and the floor is doing another. By the time the two reconcile, the decision was made for you, and the customer call has already happened.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateThe schedule lives in the ERP and reality lives on the floor. The ERP learns the truth when someone keys it, which is usually after the shift that would have let you act on it.
What changesThe answer spans the live queue on the floor, the inspection holding it and the schedule. Visual Dispatch puts the current queue on the floor, Quality-Trak holds the job on the record, and planners see progress as it happens in SyteLine. Three sources, or one record.
Can we prove these parts were good?
How it shows upA customer calls about a part made eight months ago. Finding the heat, the operator, the machine conditions and the inspection result means pulling travelers and hoping the binder is complete.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateThe machine knows it ran. Quality lives in Word and Excel. Certificates live in a binder or a shared drive. Proving a single part's story is archaeology, and an audit is a two week fire drill for people who have other jobs.
What changesThe answer spans the inspection on the job, the certificate on the lot and the instruction the operator saw. Quality-Trak records the inspection on the work order, Doc-Trak scans the cert to the lot at receiving and collects every document on the job into one PDF, and the view log says who saw the instruction.
The floor's reality is invisible, late, or disputed. Capture it where it happens and it stops being an argument.
Labor is keyed late, so job cost is wrong
How it shows upTime cards get entered in batches, or the next morning, or on Friday for the whole week. Cost reports are built on numbers that were reconstructed from memory.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateWhen labor is entered after the fact it cannot be tied to the state the job was in, the operator who did the work, or the difference between setup and run. Every cost view downstream inherits the error.
What changesLabor captured at the source as work happens: per operator, setup separated from run, quantities and scrap recorded at the operation. This is the accurate spine every cost and margin view depends on.
The floor keeps running yesterday's plan
How it shows upThe plan changed at 8 a.m. The floor finds out at 2 p.m., or at the end of the shift, or not at all.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateSchedule changes do not reach the point of work. Supervisors and planners cannot give a reliable date because they are working from a plan that has already moved.
What changesLive dispatch that reflects the current floor. Schedule changes surface at the work center, and planners see real progress to promise from.
Jobs get run out of sequence
How it shows upAn operator picks the job that is easiest to set up, or the one at the front of the rack, and the hot job waits.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateThe priority is visible in the ERP and invisible where the work happens. If the sequence is not where the operator is standing, the sequence is a suggestion.
What changesVisual dispatch on a phone, a tablet or a shop floor screen. The current priority is unmissable at the point of work, and it changes when the plan changes.
Where did the machine time actually go?
Only two of our six time categories make money. The rest are invisible.
How it shows upAt the end of the week nobody can say how the machine's hours were spent. Too much happens at once to track by hand, so the improvement opportunity stays hidden.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateMachine state is not recorded anywhere. What gets recorded is what a person declared, which is a summary of a memory of a shift.
What changesAutomatic accounting for all 8,760 hours in the year. Every machine's run, idle and down state captured live, categorized against a published measurement standard, with the cost of the downtime made visible in dollars.
Downtime and performance loss stay hidden
How it shows upThe same stoppage happens every week and nobody has the evidence to justify fixing it.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateDowntime reasons are captured after the fact if at all, and losses are buried in a monthly report that arrives after the month it describes.
What changesReal time downtime and reason capture tied to the job and the cell, with losses surfaced continuously instead of discovered in a report.
The same part takes different times on different machines
How it shows upAn identical part runs in four hours on one machine and six on another, and nobody knows why, so the standard is set somewhere in the middle and every quote inherits the guess.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateRun time variability is real, measurable and completely invisible without machine level data. The standard becomes folklore.
What changesPart duration variability exposed across machines and across runs, drillable to the cause, so standards start reflecting reality and quotes start learning.
Bottlenecks are hard to see across the floor
How it shows upEveryone has a theory about which work center is the constraint, and the theories do not agree.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separatePerformance data is siloed by machine and by department, so the constraint that is actually pacing the plant cannot be pinpointed, only argued about.
What changesCorrelated performance across work centers that surfaces the real bottleneck and what it is costing, in one view rather than five.
The morning meeting argues about what is true
Our 7:15 meeting runs on a 5:30 spreadsheet.
How it shows upSomebody comes in early to hand build the standup view. Two departments bring two extracts, the numbers disagree, and the first fifteen minutes go to deciding whose number to use.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateEvery view is a separate extract with separate inclusion choices. Two people can query the same database and get two different scrap rates, because the disagreement is about definitions, not data.
What changesOne live operating picture everyone shares: attainment, trouble and progress to the minute, on one set of definitions. The meeting starts from agreed truth and spends its time on decisions.
Nobody trusts the metrics, so goals get set blind
How it shows upA target gets announced. The floor does not believe the baseline it was built on, so nobody owns the target.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateWithout an automatic, visible baseline, a goal is somebody's opinion. Accountability cannot attach to a number people think is wrong.
What changesAn automatic baseline everyone can see and drill into, so goals are grounded and accountability runs in both directions.
A simple performance question takes days and a ticket
How it shows upYou want to know something the system definitely knows. Getting the answer means a static report, a spreadsheet reconciliation, or waiting on somebody in IT.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateEvery new question needs a new report, and reports are built by the people with the least time.
What changesSelf-serve, drillable analytics on your SyteLine data, from the record you are already looking at, so a manager gets to root cause without opening a ticket.
The right document does not reach the operation, and proof is assembled by hand after the fact.
The wrong revision is on your shop floor right now
We cut to rev C after engineering released D. We caught it at test, the expensive place.
How it shows upA print gets pulled, a change gets released, and the packet at the machine is still the old one. The miss is caught at inspection, at test, or by the customer.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separatePaper travelers and printed drawings go stale the moment they print. An engineering change reaches the drive, the email and the meeting, and does not reach the operation.
What changesCurrent revision instructions on the operator's screen at the operation, with changes propagating to the live job. The wrong revision never reaches the floor because the floor is not holding a copy.
People burn hours hunting for documents
How it shows upAn invoice, a purchase order, a certificate or a drawing exists somewhere across a shared drive, an inbox, a chat thread and a filing cabinet, under three naming conventions.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateDocuments are filed by whoever touched them last, in whatever place made sense that day. Retrieval and version control both break down at the same time.
What changesDocuments that live on the SyteLine record they belong to and find the work automatically. One place, in context, every time, without asking anyone to change how they file.
There is too much paper on the shop floor
How it shows upJob packets, travelers and marked up prints move around the plant in a way nobody can search, audit or trust.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separatePaper is the only mechanism that reaches the operator today, and paper cannot be updated in place.
What changesThe right document delivered digitally to the work and updated where it sits. Paper leaves the floor without anybody losing access to what was on it.
An audit means digging for the file you cannot find
How it shows upThe registrar asks for the one record that is hardest to produce, and two people spend two days producing it.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateFinding documents during an audit is onerous because they were never filed against the thing the auditor is asking about.
What changesEvery document filed in context and retrievable in a click. Audit defense becomes routine instead of a fire drill.
Back office document work is slow and untracked
How it shows upAccounts payable cannot say who approved what and when. Accounts receivable emails invoices by hand. Routine correspondence gets typed from scratch every time.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateThe document workflow was never connected to the transaction that triggered it, so every step is a person remembering to do a thing.
What changesAutomated document workflow and distribution tied to the SyteLine transaction. Approvals tracked, invoices sent, routine correspondence generated from the record.
Supplier signals get missed in an inbox
A supplier email gets missed and we stock out.
How it shows upPurchasing runs on the inbox. A confirmation, a date change or a shortage notice lands between two hundred other messages and nobody sees it until the line stops.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateThe supplier's signal arrives in a channel that knows nothing about your open orders, your job dates or your on hand balances.
What changesAn add-in that reads inbound supplier email against SyteLine context and surfaces the action before it is missed. Built as a plug-in on the document framework, with development paused and no date on it.
Defects and changes are found at the dock, in the field, or in an audit, instead of at the operation that created them.
Scrap and yield are not visible until it is too late
How it shows upA pattern shows up in a month end report, after the money is spent and the lot is gone.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateScrap and first pass yield are buried in job transactions and only reflect what somebody chose to record. There is no signal at the operation, only an aggregate later.
What changesReal time scrap and yield with drill through to the source transaction, and with Quality-Trak in place the catch moves upstream to the operation that created it.
There is no alert when quality goes out of bounds
How it shows upA bad run continues until somebody happens to walk past and notice.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateNothing is watching the process against a limit, so the first signal is a scrapped lot or a customer complaint.
What changesA machine fault or drift at the machine opens the quality record by itself. Planned, with no date.
Quality lives in spreadsheets, disconnected from the floor
How it shows upNonconformances in Word, corrective actions in Excel, inspections on paper, and none of it tied to the labor, machine or cost record for the same job.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateInspection execution and specification management sit inside the ERP. Corrective action, change control, audits, training records and supplier quality do not, by design. Infor drew that boundary itself when it partnered with a dedicated quality vendor in December 2023.
What changesNonconformance, corrective action, audit and inspection management inside SyteLine, on the same work order as labor.
Engineering changes and holds do not reach the operation
How it shows upAn over issue books as a material variance with no quality signal at all. A hold exists in somebody's head and the operation runs anyway.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateChange control and non-conformance live upstream of the floor, and the floor has no mechanism to be gated by them.
What changesNonconformance, corrective action, engineering change and deviation management inside SyteLine. The step beyond it, where a scrap entry at the station opens the quality record by itself, is in development.
Money truth arrives after the job is cold, and a variance is a number without a cause.
Profit and loss truth arrives after month end
How it shows upThe close finishes, the number appears, and then the explaining starts. Anything you would have changed happened three weeks ago.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateERP reports show posted activity. Unposted entries and anomalies mean the controller reconciles before anything can even be described, let alone acted on.
What changesCurrent profit and loss and budget against actual with drill through to the transactions behind every variance, so the surprise gets caught before the close rather than explained after it.
Variances cannot be explained or traced to source
How it shows upYou can see that the variance is 14 thousand dollars. You cannot see what it is.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateA variance is presented as a number, not a cause. Explaining it is manual detective work performed by whoever is least busy.
What changesVariance drills from the number to the source transaction, so the why behind the number is there with it.
Job cost overruns cannot be traced back
How it shows upA job runs over. Everyone agrees it ran over. Nobody can isolate whether it was setup, rework, or a routing that has been wrong for two years.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateSetup, rework and routing error all land in the same bucket, so quoting never learns anything from the overrun.
What changesOverruns traced to their labor, machine and quality drivers on the job, which is the feedback loop that improves the next quote.
Payroll and job time get reconciled by hand every cycle
How it shows upEvery pay period, somebody compares two sets of hours and resolves the differences manually.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateAttendance and job time were collected by two systems that do not agree about what an hour is, so somebody has to arbitrate.
What changesOne accurate labor record from the floor that feeds both job cost and payroll. The reconciliation stops being a task.
Working capital sits on the shelf and the schedule cannot reflect the floor it is scheduling.
Working capital is trapped in inventory
How it shows upExcess and shortages coexist in the same building, and both only become visible in the financials or in a missed shipment.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateThe ERP shows a point in time balance, not a trend. By the time the trend is visible in a statement, the cash is already on the shelf.
What changesContinuous turns, days of supply and on hand trend by item and warehouse, with the driver traceable to the decision that caused it.
Planners work off outdated inventory balances
How it shows upThe balance says twelve. There are four. The purchase order that would have covered it was not placed because the balance said twelve.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateMaterial issues are reported late, so balances lag reality, and every planning and purchasing decision inherits the lag.
What changesMaterial issues captured in real time at the point of use, so balances reflect what has actually happened.
There is no way to tell whether planning is actually improving delivery
How it shows upThe planning process changed. Delivery performance may or may not have changed with it. Nobody can prove which.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separatePlanning outcomes are never measured against planning inputs, so poor planning cannot be traced back to the bad data that caused it.
What changesPlanning performance measured over time in Fact-Trak and traced back to input data quality, which turns planning from a black box into a closed loop.
The schedule cannot reflect real capacity
How it shows upThe plan assumes infinite capacity, the floor has finite capacity, and the difference gets absorbed by expediting and overtime.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateA coarse plan cannot sequence shared work centers with real changeovers. And when schedulers do not trust the inputs, adding a better algorithm just produces a better looking wrong answer.
What changesA SyteLine schedule built from what the floor actually ran this shift, with labor and machine actuals from the same platform, so schedule adherence becomes something you can manage rather than hope for.
Vendor reality is scattered, a step behind, and disconnected from what quality already knows.
Vendor performance is scattered and a step behind
How it shows upSourcing decisions get made on relationship and memory because the data is spread across four reports that each lag receipts.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateCost, on time performance and lead time reliability live in separate places and none of them are current.
What changesSide by side vendor performance built from live receipt data: cost, on time delivery and lead time reliability on one scorecard.
Supplier quality and sourcing tradeoffs cannot be analyzed
How it shows upThe cheap supplier is late and the late supplier causes overtime, and the unit price is the only number anyone can produce.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateSupplier defects are not tracked in a way that connects to cost, so the true cost of a cheap and late supplier stays hidden.
What changesSupplier defect and delivery data joined to cost, so sourcing weighs total cost instead of unit price.
Where the money is made and where it leaks are in different systems.
Sales, margin and commission live in silos
How it shows upRevenue is in one place, cost in another, commission in a third, and margin erosion hides inside pricing, mix and cost shifts where nobody is looking.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateThe three data sets never meet, so erosion is discovered as a trend rather than caught as an event, and commissions are hard to verify on both sides.
What changesConnected revenue, margin, mix and commission. Catch erosion early, double down on what is winning, and pay on numbers everybody trusts.
Knowledge, capability and continuity are at risk from paper, turnover and platform change.
Moving to cloud ERP threatens what the floor can do
How it shows upThe cloud migration is decided, and the shop floor capability that was bolted on over fifteen years is suddenly a question mark with an unclear cost.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateAnything sitting beside the ERP has to be re-platformed, re-integrated or replaced. Document control is usually the gap nobody scoped.
What changesMoving to Infor's multi-tenant cloud? The platform moves with you. Your account team will confirm what your version supports. What is stable stays stable, and the floor comes out of the move stronger rather than exposed.
We do not want to invest in something that will disappear
How it shows upBuyers have watched tools they depended on get deprioritized. They are not asking whether the software works, they are asking whether it will still be funded in four years.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateThere is usually no way to check. A roadmap is a slide, a small vendor is a single point of failure, and code escrow just means you inherit the maintenance.
What changesFunded work on a published schedule from a company backed by a permanent-hold owner. Acquisitions are closed rather than promised, releases are monthly, and you can ask about the provenance of any component.
The same data gets re-keyed into system after system
How it shows upA number gets written on paper, typed into a spreadsheet, typed into the ERP, and typed into a report. Four chances to be wrong.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateNothing captured the data where it was created, so every system downstream needs a person to carry it there.
What changesCapture once at the source and it flows to SyteLine automatically. No re-keying, no transcription error, no reconciliation to find the typo.
People do not have the instructions to do the job right
How it shows upA new hire, a temp, or an experienced operator on an unfamiliar part all face the same problem: the knowledge is in somebody's head and that person is on second shift.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateWork instructions exist in a binder, a drive or a memory, none of which are where the work is. Manufacturing is heading into a decade of hiring, and tribal knowledge does not scale.
What changesWork instructions delivered in context at the operation, versioned, approved and enforced in sequence where that matters, so anyone can run the job right the first time.
Problems no single product solves, because the answer lives between the products. This is the core of the argument.
You have become your own systems integrator
Every tool we add, my team ends up re-keying the same job number into four systems.
How it shows upEach new tool solves its problem and adds an interface, a login, a data sync and a support relationship. The plant ends up running a systems integration practice it never intended to start.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateThe ERP plans the business and does not execute the floor. Each point tool holds one fragment. So the customer buys the interfaces, builds the spreadsheets, maintains the seams, and owns every cold answer.
What changesOne platform where the pieces already know each other. The correlation, the integration bill and the staleness become Lake's problem instead of yours.
Nobody can combine labor, machine and quality into job profitability
How it shows upYou can get labor efficiency. You can get machine utilization. You cannot get the one number that runs the business, which is what this job actually made.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateThe three data sets live in three products with three data models. Assembling them is a project, and the project has to be redone every time any of the three changes.
What changesLabor cost is on the open job today where you use direct job costing. Machine and quality cost join it as the products come together: the machine link to Shop-Trak is expected by the end of 2026, and cost of quality on the job follows. Planned.
There is no single source of truth for a job
How it shows upThe quote is in one place, the clock-in in another, the machine run in a third, the inspection in a fourth, and the invoice in a fifth. No single thread tells the job's story.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateEach system was correct about its own fragment. Correctness at the fragment level does not add up to a record.
What changesOne live job record from quote to clock-in to machine to inspection to invoice is the destination the platform is building toward. Shop-Trak, Doc-Trak and Fact-Trak already work on your SyteLine data today. The next direct product-to-product integration, Shop-Trak and Machine-Trak, is expected by the end of 2026, with more through 2027.
You should not need to open five products to get an answer
How it shows upEven a shop that owns everything still assembles the view by hand, per question, per role. And you have to be a SyteLine expert to get value out of SyteLine.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateEvery product has its own window and its own idea of what matters. Nobody opens five products, so people default to the one window they know and work with a fifth of the picture.
What changesA role based command center that follows you through SyteLine and assembles the health check for whatever record you are looking at. Vantage, expected early 2027.
Planning is only as good as data from every other domain
How it shows upThe scheduler is asked to promise a date using delivery history, inventory accuracy, vendor reliability and job cost timeliness, none of which are in the scheduler's system.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separatePlanning accuracy depends on clean cross domain inputs that no single tool holds. So the plan is built on last month's extract and defended in this month's meeting.
What changesThe platform feeds SyteLine planning from live labor, inventory and supplier reality, so the schedule is built on truth rather than on an extract.
Committed and near, or genuinely exploring. Nothing here is sold as available today.
Certification gates the clock-in
How it shows upAn uncertified or lapsed operator can start a job today, and nobody finds out until an audit or an incident.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateCertification records live in a spreadsheet that has no relationship to the transaction that starts work.
What changesOnly a qualified operator starts the operation, through the work center skills check in Shop-Trak. Available now with Shop-Trak.
Maintenance that opens its own work order
How it shows upA machine develops a problem. It becomes a work order when a person notices and starts paperwork, which is usually after it becomes a breakdown.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateMaintenance cost lives in no system, and detection and response are connected by a human being who has other things to do.
What changesA machine condition opens the work order, routes the technician and writes the cost back. Planned 2027.
Ask your floor a question in plain language
How it shows upGetting an answer requires knowing which report, which extract or which spreadsheet. The knowledge is tribal and the question waits on a person.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateThe data exists and the path to it does not, so the people with questions and the people with access are different people.
What changesA plain-language question over live floor data, on the AI engine you sanction and under your governance. The first use case is standard against actual variance by job and operation. Planned 2027.
Safety and environmental records without another silo
How it shows upSafety and environmental obligations are created by operations and recorded in binders and separate systems that know nothing about those operations.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateIt is a compliance surface, and compliance surfaces multiply because each one arrives with its own system.
What changesEnvironmental, health and safety records on the same engine as quality, so there is one compliance surface rather than another system. Planned, with no date.
Product and bill of material change, upstream of the floor
How it shows upEngineering intent lives upstream in a design tool or a spreadsheet, and reaches the floor as a released document rather than as a controlled change.
Why it stays unanswered when your systems are separateProduct data management sits outside both the ERP and the floor, so the handoff is a document rather than a record.
What changesA released revision walks the bill of material to every open job that carries the item, so a change reaches the floor before the old revision runs. Planned, with no date.
Every problem here belongs to one of the shop-floor functions an industry association defined in 1997
That list has not needed revision, which makes it a fair frame. Your ERP plans in months, weeks and days. Your floor works in days, shifts, hours and minutes. Every problem on this page lives on the floor side of that line.
MES for SyteLine, and where the line is drawn