A day of 'any news on this?'
The phone rings: a customer wants to know where their order is. The person who answered does not know, so they message production. Production are not sure if it shipped, so they ask the warehouse. The warehouse looks it up and replies an hour later. Meanwhile three colleagues have asked each other similar questions about other jobs.
It feels like communication. It is really a search, repeated all day, because nobody can just look.
Why nobody can simply look it up
Status gets chased when it is not recorded anywhere shared. The information does exist, but it is spread out: an email from the supplier confirming dispatch, a tick on the production whiteboard, a note in someone's diary.
Even where there is a system, its stages are often too vague to help. 'In progress' covers everything from 'not started' to 'nearly done'. So people ask anyway.
And updating the status is usually an extra step that someone has to remember. When they are busy, they do the work and skip the update, which is the right priority, but it means the system falls behind reality.
Counting the cost of the chase
- Interruptions for the people doing the work, many times a day.
- Slow, uncertain answers to customers who ask for an update.
- Delays that go unnoticed until the customer complains.
- Managers who cannot see bottlenecks without walking round asking.
The interruptions are the hidden part. Each one is small, but the people most often asked are usually the ones you most need to focus.
There is a second cost that is easy to miss. When status lives in people's heads, it disappears when they are off. The person covering has to rebuild the picture from emails before they can answer anything, and customers notice the difference between the day the usual contact is in and the day they are not.
How SpiderHunts makes status visible
| Stage | How it gets updated |
|---|---|
| Order received | Created from the web form, email or ecommerce order |
| Materials ready | Stock system confirms allocation |
| In production | Operator taps start on a tablet or phone |
| Dispatched | Courier label created, tracking number attached |
| Delivered | Courier API reports delivery |
The stages above are an example. What matters is that each one is concrete and, wherever possible, changes because something happened in a system rather than because someone remembered to click.
- Agree a short list of stages with the teams, each one defined by an event anyone can check.
- Connect the systems that already know about those events: order platform, stock, courier APIs, accounts.
- Where a stage has no system behind it, give staff a one-tap update on a phone or tablet at the point of work.
- Put everything on a single job board, filterable by customer, stage and age.
- Flag jobs that have sat at one stage longer than normal, so delays are spotted before the customer calls.
- Optionally, send customers automatic updates or a tracking page, so they do not need to ask.
Fewer questions, better answers
Anyone who picks up the phone can answer a status question by looking at the board. Production and warehouse staff get interrupted less. Managers see where work is piling up without a walk around the building.
And customers who get told what is happening before they ask tend to ring less often.
The board also becomes a quiet management tool. Because every job carries its stage and how long it has been there, you can see which stage is the usual bottleneck, whether a particular product always waits for materials, and which weeks are overloaded. Those are questions that used to need a meeting and a spreadsheet. Now they are a filter on a screen.
We keep the board simple on purpose. A status screen that tries to show everything ends up being ignored like the old one. It shows the stage, the age and the owner, and lets you click through for detail.
Recognise this?
- Status questions are one of the most common messages in your team chat.
- Customer calls about progress are passed around before anyone can answer.
- Your system's status field says 'in progress' for most jobs.
- Delays are usually discovered by the customer first.