Manufacturing operations where every quality hold has an owner — on the line and with your suppliers

Mi Retail is an operations center for manufacturing plants. It does not plan production or record lot genealogy; it manages the human work that appears around those records. A quality deviation, a batch on hold, a corrective action on a line, a breakdown that needs maintenance or a claim to a supplier becomes an Operational Work Item with an owner, a state, a due date and evidence. Each person sees the part that is theirs: operators see their line, quality sees batches waiting for a disposition, maintenance sees its open incidents and the plant manager only the decisions that need them. The domain work — BOMs, routings, production orders, quality records — runs in StoneOS apps or in the systems you already use.

No. Your ERP stays the system of record for materials, orders and costs, and your MES keeps production status, lot genealogy and hold flags. Mi Retail never keeps a second copy of that data. What it adds is the layer those systems were not built for: coordinating the people who must act when a record has a problem. The MES can tell you a batch is on hold; Mi Retail manages who reviews it, which corrective action the line owes, what the supplier has to answer, what is blocking the release and with which evidence the case closes. Keep your MES and ERP; Mi Retail takes over where the work leaves them.

When the lab records a result out of specification, quality opens a deviation work item that holds the whole case. The line places the batch on hold in the MES and closes its part with the location of the pallets. The material review board decides the disposition and records its reasoning in the same work item. If the cause points to the line, a corrective action is assigned with a due date; if it points to a raw material, a claim goes to the supplier as a derived work item. When the supplier answers and the retest passes, the plant manager approves the release, rework or scrap decision, and the hold closes with its evidence attached.

Yes. Work between organizations moves as derived work items, so both the plant and its supplier need their own organization on Mi Retail. The plant picks the supplier from the directory and sends the claim with the lot number, the test report and the deadline; the supplier receives it in its own intake queue and assigns it inside its own teams. Each side keeps its privacy: the plant follows the state, due date and answer, but not the supplier’s internal investigation or conversations. When the supplier closes the derived work item with its root-cause analysis, the plant is notified and can move to the release decision. Claims stop depending on email threads nobody tracks.

A corrective action agreed in a quality review becomes a follow-up work item with an owner on the line, a due date and a clear closing condition, such as three consecutive batches passing inspection. It stays linked to the deviation that caused it, so anyone can see why it exists. The owner marks it in progress, attaches the new settings or the updated work instruction, and can block it with a reason if a part or a validation is missing. Quality reviews the evidence before it closes. If the same defect returns, the new deviation links to the earlier action, and the pattern becomes visible instead of being rediscovered at the next audit.

Each team keeps its own queue, but the work that crosses between them travels as linked work items. A stoppage on a work center becomes an incident assigned to maintenance, linked to the production order it is delaying. Maintenance sees it ordered by priority, marks it in progress and blocks it with a reason if a spare part is missing. The line supervisor sees the state without walking over to ask, and planning can re-sequence orders when a repair runs late. When quality needs a first-article check after the repair, it receives its own work item. Nobody has to chase anybody on the radio to know whether the line can restart.

The plant manager does not need to review every deviation. Operational Portfolio shows how each line and each area is doing: batches on hold, corrective actions overdue, incidents blocking production and supplier claims without an answer. Executive Operations shows only what needs a decision at that level — a costly scrap decision, a defect that keeps returning on the same product, a supplier that repeatedly misses its response dates. In a company with several plants, the same view compares sites side by side. Operators, meanwhile, work from My Work and Today with only what is theirs. Each role sees the same operation from its own surface, with the context of each case already attached.

Every work item keeps who acted, when, under which decision and with which attachments. When a customer audits a shipment or asks about a specific batch, the plant can show the full trail: the test report, the hold, the review board’s reasoning, the corrective action with its proof of effectiveness, the supplier’s analysis and the release decision. The lot genealogy itself stays in your traceability system; Mi Retail keeps the record of the human decisions around it. Control & Assurance lets an internal auditor or a customer quality team review those trails without asking anyone for screenshots, because the evidence was captured while the work happened.

Yes, it is the same product at both ends. In a workshop where a handful of people run production, quality and purchasing, the experience collapses to the essentials: one Today view with what is on hold, what is waiting on a supplier and what must be solved before the next order ships, without fake hierarchies or empty teams. In a manufacturer with several plants and hundreds of people, the same work items are distributed across lines, quality, maintenance, planning and plant management, each with its own surface, and exceptions escalate to the right level. What changes is how responsibilities are split, not the way the work is represented.

Yes. Contract manufacturing lives on handoffs between companies: the brand owner requests a production run, approves an artwork or a specification change, and needs answers when a batch deviates. In Mi Retail, each of those requests is a derived work item that lands in the contract manufacturer’s own intake, is assigned inside its teams and returns with the requested evidence, such as a first-article report or a sample approval. The brand owner follows the state and the result without seeing the manufacturer’s internal work, and the manufacturer serves several brands without mixing their information. The same pattern works for toll processing, subcontracted machining or outsourced packaging.

The Manufacturing edition of StoneOS brings apps for the domain work of a plant — product engineering, bills of materials, routings, work centers, MRP, production planning, production orders, shop floor, capacity planning, manufacturing costing, quality management, batch traceability and yield and waste — on top of the Business Core apps every team uses: Chat, Docs, Drive, Calendar, People, Notes, Sheets, Slides and To-do. Those apps keep the depth of each domain. Mi Retail is where the work they generate meets the people who must move it: a failed inspection, a capacity conflict or a yield drop lands as a work item in the right person’s queue. If you keep your current MES or ERP, it stays the record.

Start with one process that keeps slipping — quality holds, supplier claims or maintenance stoppages — instead of modeling the whole plant. Create the workspace for that area, invite the people involved and let the first deviations arrive as work items with an owner and a due date. Within a few weeks you will see where batches wait and who carries the load. Then add the next line or area, invite your key suppliers to receive claims through Mi Retail, connect the systems you already use and, when it makes sense, bring in the Manufacturing edition apps from StoneOS. Mi Retail is free to start, so a single line can try it before rolling it out to every plant.