Make-to-order turns a customer order into production. When someone orders an item you build rather than stock, you can create a work order straight from the order line, watch its progress without leaving the order, and trace every work order back to the order (and line item) that triggered it.
Make-to-order is part of Manufacturing, which requires the Raw-Material Tracking entitlement (Pro plan). The plan is re-checked whenever you view or act on a work order. The advisory availability badges on order lines also require this plan.
Every sales-order line item has inline Production controls, including a per-line "Create work order" button.
Go to Orders and open the order you want to build for.
Find the line item you want to produce.
In that line's Production controls, select "Create work order".
The New Work Order page opens prefilled with the item, the line quantity, and the originating order.
Adjust anything you like before saving: title, planned quantity, location, inventory behavior, reference label, due date, assignees, tags, notes, and the assembly-step checklist.
Save the work order.
The inventory behavior defaults based on the linked product. A variant with a bill of materials defaults to "Consume components and add finished goods" (builds consume the recipe and add the finished item to stock); a variant without one defaults to "Add finished goods."
You can create more than one work order from the same line item (for example, splitting a large quantity across separate runs). The order tracks all of them.
You can also create a work order for the whole order rather than one line: use the "Create work order" button next to the order's production summary. That work order is tied to the order but not to any single line item.
Once a line has linked work orders, the order shows you their progress at a glance.
- Each line item displays chips for its linked work orders, each showing the work-order number and its current status.
- The order shows a production summary that rolls the linked work orders up by status, for example "2 work orders: 1 released, 1 in progress."
Use the chips to jump into a specific work order and the summary to see the overall picture for the order.
On the Raw-Material Tracking plan, each order line item also shows an advisory availability badge so you can tell at a glance whether that line can be built or fulfilled right now at your default location.
- "Available" (green) means the line's full quantity can be built or fulfilled at your default location.
- "Not available" (red) means it cannot. Select the badge to see which materials are short, how much this line needs, and how much is needed across the whole order versus how much is available.
The badge is advisory: nothing is reserved, and it is a snapshot taken when you open the order, not a live figure.
Open a work order that was created from an order and its detail page shows an "Originating Sales Order" card. The card links back to the sales order it came from, the customer, and the specific line item that triggered it.
This gives you a two-way trail: chips and the production summary lead from the order to its work orders, and the card leads from a work order back to its order.
When you cancel a sales order, Organizely automatically cleans up the production it triggered:
- Linked work orders that have not built anything yet are cancelled automatically.
- Linked work orders that have already produced units stay open, so a person can decide how to finish them (typically closing short to keep what was built and drop the rest).
Units that were already built are never un-built.
If you would rather not create work orders line by line, a variant can be set to auto-create a work order when it sells. You configure this on the variant's Materials tab, in the Manufacturing card (which also lets you bind a work-order template). Auto-created make-to-order work orders route to the default location's default workstation.
A team member's personal "My default" workstation only prefills the manual New Work Order form. It does not affect make-to-order auto-creation.