The Production PWA

There's a Progressive Web App at /garments/production built specifically for the people who don't sit at a desk. Line supervisors with a tablet on a stitching line. A cutter with a phone in their pocket. A receiving clerk standing next to a delivery.

The Frappe Desk works on a phone — sort of — but it wasn't designed for it. The Production PWA was. Big touch targets, simple navigation, fast in low-light factory floor conditions, works offline-tolerant, installs to a home screen like a native app.

Who it's for

Three audiences:

Line supervisors running Production Batches — they need to start operations, record handoffs, post end-of-shift activity, all without leaving the floor.
Cutting room working on Cutting Orders — moving an order from Pending → Marked → Spread → Cut → Handed Over.
Sampling room working on Samples — recording sample status changes and capturing measurements.

Anyone managing the work from a desk (production managers, planners, accountants) is better served by the full Desk. The PWA isn't a lesser Desk — it's a different tool for a different job.

Installing it on a device

Visit https://your-site.com/garments/production on the device's browser, then:

iOS Safari: Share → Add to Home Screen.
Android Chrome: ⋮ menu → Install app (or Add to Home Screen).

Once installed, it launches like a native app. No app store, no install package, no update cycle — when you ship a new version, the next time the supervisor opens the app, they get it.

What's inside

Seven views, accessed from the tab bar at the bottom:

Production (Pipeline) — the default landing. The list of active Production Batches the user is responsible for, with status, current operation, and quick actions.
Cutting — list and detail views for Cutting Orders. Tapping into a Cutting Order shows the workflow buttons (Approve, Hold) in big-touch form.
Sampling — list, create, and detail views for Samples. A sample room can request, mark in-production, sent, approved or rejected without ever opening the Desk.
Operations (Assembly) — list, create, and detail views for Assembly tasks. Configurable for shops that assign operations to operators by name.
Cards (Batch Cards) — list and create views for Batch Cards. End-of-shift wrap-up the supervisor fills in before going home.
Stats — at-a-glance numbers for the unit the supervisor is responsible for: units done today, units done this week, defect rate, hours logged.
Settings — user, language, theme, sync controls.

Image: The Production PWA Pipeline view on a tablet, showing a list of active Batches with status chips and quick-action buttons.

How it syncs with the Desk

Everything the PWA does is talking to the same database the Desk talks to. There's no separate data store. A handoff posted from the PWA shows up immediately in the Operation Ledger on the Desk; a Batch status change posted from the Desk shows up on the next refresh in the PWA.

That means:

No data duplication. One source of truth.
No reconciliation overhead. What happens in one place is visible everywhere.
No offline mode in the traditional sense — the PWA needs network for posting. It buffers gracefully on flaky connections, but it's not designed as a long-offline tool.

The PWA uses the same user accounts as the Desk. Log in once, and the session persists. Each posted entry is attributed to the logged-in user, exactly as it would be on the Desk.

Sensible practice: give each supervisor their own user. The audit trail is only useful if you can tell who did what.

What to do next

The PWA is best understood by using it. Install it on a device, walk a Production Batch through a couple of operations, watch the Operation Ledger update on the Desk in real time. Once you've done it once, the rest is intuitive.