Every order has a fulfilment status — pending, processing, shipped, completed, cancelled. That is enough for a shirt. It is not enough for anything with real production behind it, where "processing" covers a fortnight of distinct steps.
Production statuses are your own stages, defined per product, that sit inside that journey.
Defining them
Set them on the product. Name them after the steps your team already talks about, in the order they happen — a signage product might run: artwork requested, artwork approved, in production, ready for install, installed.
Using them
Open the order and move it on as the work progresses. Where a product is sold by the unit, individual entries carry their own production status too — so one shirt in an order of twenty can be held for a reprint without holding the other nineteen.
The Register can be filtered by production status, which is how you get "everything waiting on artwork" across every order at once.
They do not replace the order status
| Status | Scope | Who reads it |
|---|---|---|
| Fulfilment status | The whole order. A fixed set. | The buyer, mostly. |
| Production status | The work inside it. Yours to define. | Your team. |
Changing the list later
You can edit the stages after a product is live, but orders already sitting at a stage you remove are left pointing at something that no longer exists. If you need to restructure, move the in-flight orders first, then change the list.
Keep the list short
Four or five stages is usually right. A dozen produces a screen nobody keeps current, and a stale status is worse than none — people stop believing it and go back to asking in chat, which is the thing you were trying to fix.