It is 11 a.m. A purchase head from a key account calls your sales coordinator.
Their fabricator is waiting for a batch of aluminium profiles. Transport needs to be arranged, and the site team wants a delivery confirmation.
“Is the material ready? Can we send the vehicle?”
The coordinator checks with production. The batch came off the coating line yesterday. Quality still needs to confirm the release. Packing has some of the quantity ready, but dispatch is checking the balance against the challan.
“I’ll check and call you back.”
A familiar answer. And, quite often, the only honest one available.
Twenty minutes later, the customer gets an update. In between, three or four people have stopped their own work to help find it.
Nothing particularly unusual has happened. That is precisely why the cost is so easy to overlook.
Your Account Manager Has Become the Order Tracker
In a finishing business, “Where is my order?” is rarely a simple question about location.
The customer may really be asking whether the full lot has cleared inspection. Whether a shade variation has held up part of the batch. Whether the profiles are packed, or just finished. And whether “ready today” means they should actually send a vehicle.
There is a difference. Anyone who has had a truck waiting at the gate knows it.
These details matter because your customer has commitments of their own. A fabricator is planning production. A contractor has installation labour booked. A purchase manager has already given someone else a date.
Meanwhile, your account manager is moving between calls, messages and shop-floor updates, trying to give a dependable answer.
That takes time away from account development, resolving genuine service issues and discussing the next requirement. The customer, understandably, sees only that they had to ask again.
Forty Queries a Day Add Up
Take an illustrative plant handling 40 status queries a day.
Assume each enquiry uses eight minutes of combined staff time across customer service, production, stores and dispatch. Some take two minutes. Others involve a walk to the packing area and three unanswered calls. Eight minutes is simply the working assumption here.
| Calculation | Illustrative cost |
|---|---|
| 40 queries × 8 combined staff-minutes | 320 staff-minutes a day |
| Converted into hours | Approximately 5.3 staff-hours a day |
| × 25 working days | Approximately 133 staff-hours a month |
| × ₹250 blended employment cost per hour | Approximately ₹33,333 a month |
| × 12 months | Approximately ₹4 lakh a year |
Use your own figures:
Daily queries × combined staff-minutes per query ÷ 60 × monthly working days × hourly employment cost × 12.
One detail is worth getting right: count everyone’s time. A four-minute conversation between your coordinator and dispatch supervisor uses eight staff-minutes.
At the same assumptions, 20 queries a day represent roughly ₹2 lakh annually. At 80, the figure approaches ₹8 lakh.
This is the value of staff capacity absorbed by routine coordination, rather than an expense you can simply remove from next month’s payroll. The opportunity is to put that time back into work that needs attention.
And most plants have no shortage of that.
The Awkward Part Is the Promise You Have Already Made
The time calculation only takes you so far.
Consider the customer who sends a vehicle because sales understood that the material was ready. On arrival, the driver discovers that part of the lot is awaiting inspection.
Or the account manager who confirms Friday’s delivery, unaware that a portion of the batch has gone for rework.
Neither situation necessarily starts with carelessness. Often, someone is working from an update that was accurate a few hours earlier.
But the customer has already acted on it.
Now there is a transport issue to resolve, a revised commitment to explain and, sometimes, a senior relationship to repair. The discussion moves quickly from “What is the status?” to “Why were we told something different?”
For a sales leader, that is an account confidence issue. For customer service, it is another escalation with little control over the underlying answer. For the owner, it is one more operational detail arriving on the phone between meetings.
How much of your leadership team’s day goes into confirming things the business already knows somewhere?
“Off the Line” Is Not Quite the Same as “Ready”
This is where finishing operations need more than a broad order-status label.
A lot can be processed but awaiting inspection. Cleared, but not fully packed. Partly dispatched, with a balance still in rework. One inward challan may cover several profiles and more than one outward movement.
“Completed” can mean different things to production, quality, dispatch and the customer.
A useful update needs to make those distinctions clear:
- What quantity has been processed?
- What has cleared inspection?
- What is packed and available for dispatch?
- What remains on hold, and why?
- What can the customer realistically plan around?
Your team may already have all of this information. Just not together.
The job card has one part. The planning sheet has another. The latest change is in a WhatsApp message sent to someone who is currently on the floor.
So the next enquiry starts another round of checking.
Give Customers an Answer They Can Use
A customer portal can help. But putting yesterday’s uncertain update on a screen does very little for anyone.
The work starts inside the operation.
Keep the order connected as the material moves
Use a consistent reference to connect the customer order, inward challan, job or batch, inspection and dispatch records.
Where quantities split across lots or deliveries, the record needs to retain that detail. Otherwise, the same question returns in a slightly different form: “Yes, but what about the balance?”
Capture updates where the work happens
Someone needs to own each update, at an agreed point in the process.
That might be receipt confirmation, completion of processing, quality release or packing. Keep it practical. If recording a milestone is cumbersome, people will leave it until later—and the information gap opens again.
Show customers what helps them plan
A secure customer view should make routine checks straightforward: current stage, released quantity, dispatched quantity, outstanding balance and the latest confirmed delivery information.
Customers will still call. Some will prefer to, and exceptions will always need a conversation.
But a purchase manager should not have to call simply to establish whether a lot has cleared inspection.
Flag the problem while there is still time to respond
A quality hold or likely dispatch slippage needs to reach the person responsible for the customer commitment.
Early enough to do something useful.
That may mean arranging a partial dispatch, revising transport or agreeing a different delivery sequence. An alert is valuable when it helps someone make that decision.
What Changed at Radiant Anodisers
Radiant Anodisers, a surface finishing business in Rajasthan, worked with XAAS Genie to connect its operations using Zoho Creator.
The system linked departmental workflows around a traceable challan reference. Customers could log in to a dedicated portal, enter their delivery challan number and check the processing stage of their material.
Zoho’s published case study reports fewer follow-up calls and earlier visibility of potential delays.
It also reports approximately three hours saved per person per day across five manager-level roles. That figure relates to the broader operational implementation, rather than the portal alone.
For a finishing business, the relevance is straightforward: customers can see progress, and the internal team spends less time retrieving it on their behalf.
Read the Radiant Anodisers case study →
Try This with One Live Order
Pick an order that is due for dispatch soon. Ideally, one with a partial quantity or an outstanding inspection.
Ask sales, customer service and dispatch the same three questions:
What can move today? What is holding the balance? What have we committed to the customer?
Then compare the answers.
They may match. They may also reveal a small but important difference between what has happened on the floor and what the customer has been told.
For the next week, keep a simple tally of status enquiries. Record roughly how much combined staff time each takes and where the answer had to be chased.
No elaborate exercise is needed. A shared sheet will do.
You are looking for the recurring gaps: the handover nobody records, the quality release sales cannot see, the balance quantity that requires a separate call every time.
That gives you a sensible place to start.
Your Customers Have Work Waiting on Your Answer
A reliable update helps a customer book transport, schedule fabrication or keep an installation team productive. It also gives your account team firmer ground to stand on. They can discuss options and manage exceptions with confidence, instead of asking the customer to wait while they check again.
At XAAS Genie, we help manufacturers connect shop-floor progress with the information their customers, service teams and account leaders need.
The starting point can be modest: one workflow, one key account, one recurring question that takes too long to answer.
Where does “I’ll check and call you back” happen most often in your business?
Discuss Your Order Visibility Gaps with XAAS Genie →
Or email connect@xaasgenie.com with “Order Visibility” in the subject line. Tell us where your team gets stuck.
