A high-mix job shop has a different problem from a line. The line runs the same product over and over; the shop runs a hundred different parts a week, each with its own route. The trouble is rarely one slow machine. It’s work-in-progress piling up everywhere and a priority list that nobody trusts, because everything is marked urgent.

What goes wrong on a busy floor

Two things drown a high-mix shop. The first is WIP: too many jobs released at once, so every cell is “in progress” and nothing finishes. The second is priority noise. Free-form rush flags, a number you can edit, three different colours for “important”, and after a few weeks the planner can’t tell what actually has to ship first. Both problems get worse the more you try to schedule your way out of them.

Eryxon Flow’s take

Eryxon Flow is an MES for high-mix manufacturing. It tracks the real structure of the work, Job to Part to Operation, as each part moves through your cells, so you always know where a part is and where it goes next. That part is plain MES: a live picture of the floor instead of a paper traveler and memory.

The opinion sits on top of it. Instead of a priority field anyone can change, there are exactly two cards:

  • A Bullet Card marks a part as the priority. It sorts to the top and gets highlighted wherever its work shows up, so planners and operators spot it at a glance. Its value comes from being rare.
  • A Yellow Card puts an operation on hold (waiting on material, an answer, a tool). The parked operation drops out of the cell’s capacity and load count, so holding it frees the slot and other work keeps moving.

Two cards, not a priority spectrum. That’s the whole point: a signal stays a signal when there’s only one of it.

Pragmatic, not dogmatic

The flow focus and the cards come from QRM (Quick Response Manufacturing) and Rajan Suri’s work. We borrow the ideas that help on a real floor and skip the rest. Eryxon Flow does not implement POLCA: there are no card loops, no paired-cell authorization. It is an MES that follows QRM principles, not a QRM tool you have to adopt wholesale before it earns its keep.

That matters because most shops can’t stop the world to roll out a method. They can put a WIP limit on one cell, park a stuck job so the cell breathes, and flag the one order that truly has to ship. Small moves, visible the same day.

The detail of how the two cards behave (who applies them, what happens when a hold comes off) is on the Bullet and Yellow card page.

Try it

Want to see it on your own data before committing to anything? Open the hosted version and walk a job through your cells.