Most attempts at production tracking die in the same place: the list filled in at night, the spreadsheet updated at the end of the day, the information gathered once a week. It is abandoned in the first busy week and never set up again. The reason is not that people do not care but that the system was designed as extra work.
That is where a glass barcode system differs. Scanning rides on a movement that was happening anyway: the piece arrives at the station, it is scanned, the process starts. It takes a couple of seconds and in return the current stage of the piece enters the record. Nobody fills in a separate form and nobody compiles a list in the evening. Because the record is a by product of the work, it survives.
For scanning to be useful the label has to exist first. A labelling system gives the piece its identity; the barcode makes that identity machine readable. They are described as separate programs but they are two ends of one flow; with no label there is nothing to scan.
Network coverage in a workshop is not always the same quality, and that detail decides the fate of the system. When a terminal goes offline the scans are queued and processed in order once the connection returns. The operator does not think about the connection. Otherwise the habit breaks at the first outage, and an incomplete record takes away trust in the whole record.
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 side benefit of scanning is that the identity of the piece becomes sharp. The information on the label says which order, which position and which size it belongs to; two pieces of similar size do not get mixed up. Sizes close to each other are common in glass and telling them apart by eye is not always possible.
The same scan does its work at dispatch. When packed pieces are scanned it becomes clear by itself which order is complete, and a dispatch system shows the missing piece before dispatch day. That is the wholeness meant by a barcode system for glass workshops: one label, one scan, one record from cutting to delivery.