Case Studies | SaaS B2B

Automating production-order printing on the factory floor

Production Order Printing Automation

About

A SaaS B2B business working with Cloud Combinator on AWS. The client is anonymised at their request.

Challenge

The engagement had four focus areas, each addressing a weak point in the existing manual process.

Removing manual printing effort

Production orders were printed by hand once released to the shop floor, a repetitive step that consumed planning-team time and left room for orders to be missed, duplicated or printed at the wrong moment in the process.

Grouping orders correctly

Orders tied to the same sales order and product pool, such as amGard or tGard, must be printed together as a single consolidated document. Getting that grouping right by hand across many concurrent orders was fiddly and error-prone.

Producing machine-readable codes exactly

Each printout must carry QR codes and barcodes in precise formats for logistics scanning, lock engraving and end-of-line testing. Any deviation from the required format would fail downstream scanning and testing.

Keeping systems in sync and auditable

Dynamics 365 and the code and differ database had to stay consistent, with fields locked during active processing, references cleaned up on cancellation, and a full trail of what was printed, when and by whom.

Solution

The workflow triggers when the shop floor changes a production order to "Started" in Dynamics 365. Power Automate monitors open orders and validates that every order in the same sales order and pool group has reached that status before doing anything, so a group is only ever printed once it is complete. It then pulls the required data from Dynamics 365 and the code and differ database over their APIs and merges it into a pre-defined Word template.

60 sec

Target time from all orders "Started" to print dispatch (target)

500/hr

Production orders handled per hour without degradation (target)

99.9%

Uptime target for the Power Automate flow (target)

By the numbers:

60 sec - Target time from all orders "Started" to print dispatch (target)
500/hr - Production orders handled per hour without degradation (target)
99.9% - Uptime target for the Power Automate flow (target)

Changes

The solution replaces manual production-order printing with an automated, validated and fully audited workflow that keeps Dynamics 365 and the code and differ database consistent from trigger to printout. The performance figures below are the solution's design targets, defined in the functional specification and confirmed at acceptance.

Automated, grouped printing — A Dynamics 365 status change triggers a single consolidated document for every order in the same sales order and pool, with no manual collation.
Codes in exact format — Per-order QR codes for end-of-line testing, engraving QR codes per code and differ entry, and header and item-level barcodes, all generated to the formats downstream teams require.
Systems kept in step — Two-way updates between Dynamics 365 and the code and differ app, field locking during active processing, work order write-back, and automatic cleanup that releases differ codes when orders are cancelled.
Reliable and auditable — Print-status logging, error capture within one minute with email alerts, daily reporting to the planning team, and a full audit trail of prints, reprints and cancellations.
Built to change safely — The Word template is designed so layout and fields can be updated without reworking the flow, and the design supports new templates and multi-country rollout.

With printing automated and its two core systems kept in sync, the client has a scalable foundation it can extend to new product templates and additional countries without significant re-engineering as production volumes grow.

AWS Stack

Microsoft Power Automate

For the automated print, sync and cleanup workflows.