What numbers should a small job shop track every week?

A worked weekly scorecard

These are invented operating inputs for a small milling shop, not industry targets. Five complete RFQs took 2, 4, 6, 10 and 18 business hours to quote, giving a median of 6 hours. Separately, ten older quotes received a decision this week: four wins and six losses. The other open quotes stay out of that denominator until decided.

Assume the completed jobs had 100 quoted production hours and 120 recorded hours. Nine of ten order lines due this week shipped complete by the acknowledged date. Two mills were staffed for 40 hours each and recorded 52 combined spindle hours. Completed jobs sold for $25,000 against $19,000 of consistently allocated job cost. Exclude sales tax and use the same cost categories every week.

Define the clocks before comparing weeks

For quote speed, record both RFQ arrival and the point when the package became complete. Report buyer waiting time separately from estimating time so unanswered questions remain visible. Use business hours for the internal clock and specify your working calendar. A Friday afternoon RFQ should not quietly count weekend hours in one estimator's spreadsheet and exclude them in another's.

Track wins by count and by quoted dollars. Four small wins can hide a lost package that would have filled the month. Mark no-bids separately from customer losses, and record the loss reason when the buyer supplies one. A change in the mix of repeat work and difficult prototypes can move win rate without indicating a change in sales performance.

Delivery needs a stable promise date. Save the original acknowledged date alongside any agreed revision; otherwise moving dates can make late work disappear. Define whether a partial shipment counts. For the example, a line is on time only when its whole required quantity ships, and each line receives one vote regardless of its dollar value.

Collect the inputs without buying another system

Use a quote tab with RFQ identifier, complete-package timestamp, sent timestamp, quoted dollars, decision and reason. Use a job tab with promised date, shipped date, quoted setup and run hours, actual setup and run hours, sales, material, outside services and burdened conversion cost. A machine tab needs staffed hours and spindle-counter readings. Avoid putting unattended overnight hours over a daytime-only denominator; expand the defined available hours when your operating schedule changes.

Reconcile time tickets before judging the estimator. Setup, deburring, inspection and rework should have their own entries; their disappearance into an overhead bucket makes quoted versus actual run time misleading. A burdened hourly cost already containing overhead should not receive the same overhead allocation again. The 24% figure is a job margin under the stated cost model, not a claim about cash flow or company net profit.

What to do at the next weekly meeting

Pick one completed job behind the 20-hour overrun and trace the difference. If a second setup was omitted, update that routing before another quote leaves. If the additional hours were an approved customer change, separate them from estimating error and check that they were billed. Give one person the correction and a due date.

Keep the first several weekly records as your own baseline. Discuss changes with their job mix and denominator rather than adopting an unsupported universal target. A busier spindle can accompany falling margin when the shop wins underpriced work; the scorecard becomes useful when the six numbers explain one another.

• Calculate win rate by count and value
• Define available and sold machine hours