Once an order has been cut, the parts start moving around the workshop. One goes to edging, one waits for tempering, one is already packed. During that journey the only way to know where a part is usually is to ask, and the answer is as accurate as the person's memory. The date given to a customer on the phone rests on the same memory. The purpose of production tracking is not to remove that question, but to move its answer from memory into a record.
The barcode is the simplest tool for this. Every part gets its own label when it is cut, and is scanned as it passes a station. Scanning takes a couple of seconds and in return the current stage of the part enters the record. Nobody fills in a separate form and nobody compiles a list in the evening. The record forms as a by product of the work itself, which is why it survives; tracking systems designed as extra work are usually abandoned in the first busy week.
Network coverage in a workshop is not always the same quality. When the terminal goes offline the scans are queued and processed in order once the connection returns. What this means in practice is that the operator does not think about the connection and keeps scanning. Otherwise the habit of recording breaks at the first outage and never comes back, because an incomplete record takes away trust in the whole record.
Breakage is part of the same flow. When a part is broken or cut wrong, that fact enters the record and a remake is opened for it. The missing part is no longer discovered on dispatch day; it is visible the moment it happens. The difference between the two is the difference between warning the customer a day earlier and apologising at dispatch, and it comes entirely from timing.
After a while the accumulated record starts answering its own questions. Which process waits the longest, which station piles up on which day, why a particular order ran late. These can be discussed from memory too; but discussed from memory, everyone has a different answer. A record produces a single answer, and discussion gives way to a decision.
You do not need to set up every station to begin. Scanning at a single stage is already enough to close the question of where something is right now. Each station added afterwards sharpens the picture a little more. What the software does here is not to manage production; it collects the information production already generates, keeps it from getting lost, and puts it in front of whoever asks.