Production management isn’t one of my strengths. At all. The ADHD tendency to create doom piles, hyperfocus on the wrong thing, or get squirreled by a shiny new order has led to a fair amount of chaos around here.

Lately, even figuring out what to print, when, how many, and in what order has been eating a bigger and bigger chunk of my mental load.

So I’ve spent a good chunk of April on back-end work to at least get the data side of this operation running smoothly.

First up: pulling all my product and order data out of Google Sheets and into Airtable, then setting up integrations so orders flow in cleanly and update themselves as their status changes.

That alone unlocked some genuinely cool stuff, like a dashboard that tells me at a glance which pre-orders are ready to ship and which are still waiting on final product.

Next, I tackled the production side. I built three lightweight forms to log prints, subassemblies, and packaged products, with triggers between them so finishing one thing automatically updates inventory across the chain — individual prints, subassemblies (like Sherman end connectors), and final products.

No more guessing what’s actually on the shelf or getting bottlenecked by a lack of the right size FDM boxes!

Lastly, I extended all of this into production planning. Print, subassembly, and product packaging logs all feed into inventory levels. That data, plus sales trends and incoming orders, all feeds my now-automated resin and FDM print queues.

Getting all of this up and running was definitely a slog, but even after just a few days I’m feeling the results. For the first time this year, I’m caught up on orders, and mostly caught up on inventory too. The mental load of “wait, do I have enough of those? did I print the thing? what’s shipping this week?” has fallen way off, which means more of my brain is free for the parts of this work I actually love.

Up next…a full website redesign. And hopefully not breaking too many things in the transition!

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