From shop order to loading dock: 68 documented releases of a production and shipping system

Large industrial fans are built to order and shipped disassembled. A single fan leaves the factory as several handling units, each with its own weight, packaging and place on the truck. If one part is missing at the destination, the installation waits.

The client's shop-order system knew what had to be built, but not how it would be packed, weighed, planned and loaded. That knowledge lived in spreadsheets and in the experience of a few people.

A system that people on the shop floor and at the loading dock rely on every day also has to change carefully: each version must say what it changed.

We built the flow in stages, releasing each part as soon as it was useful. Scanning each unit as it is loaded checks the truck against the packing list, so a missing unit shows up at the dock, not at the customer's site.

The flow covers:

• Orders and bills of materials, imported from the shop-order system.

• Packing lists and handling units, with the weighing of each unit.

• Weekly production planning, including the planning of laser production.

• Loading plan for each shipment.

• Barcode-driven shipping: each unit is scanned as it is loaded.

• A5 pallet labels, and exports to Excel and PDF.

• Safety module: the workflow for installation and operation manuals, and the related dossiers.

• Machinery quotes.

Orders and bills of materials come from the shop-order system, so nothing is typed twice. The safety module and the machinery quotes were added later on the same platform, as the system extended to new areas.

The application runs on Azure App Service with Azure SQL, keeps documents in Blob Storage and uses Azure Service Bus for background work. People sign in through Keycloak single sign-on.

The system has reached 68 releases — version 1.41 in June 2026 — and each one is described in a changelog, so the client always knows what changed and why.

Packing, weighing, planning, loading and labelling happen in one application, from the order to the truck. The same platform also carries the safety documentation and the machinery quotes, so the client extends one system instead of adding another.

• Angular 21
• .NET 10
• Azure App Service
• Azure SQL
• Azure Blob Storage
• Azure Service Bus
• Keycloak