What is a job card in manufacturing?

Keep it to one page where possible. A job card nobody reads is a job card nobody fills in. Instructions longer than a line belong on the drawing or a work instruction, referenced by number.

• Work order number, item code, description, quantity and due date
• A barcode of the work order number so each step can be scanned
• Operations in sequence: work centre, instruction, expected time
• Material lines with quantity to issue and a place to note what was issued
• Boxes for operator, start and end time, good quantity, scrap and reason
• Inspection points, a signature box, and the drawing number and revision

A paper job card filled in by hand is a record that reaches the office days later, if at all, and is then typed in by someone who was not there. A barcode on the card lets the operator scan at the start and end of each operation with a scanner or a phone. The scan writes the labour entry and the status change directly to the work order, with the time and the user. Scrap is entered as a quantity on the same screen. The office sees job status as it happens and the job cost builds up during the job, not after it. Code 128 is the usual symbology because it encodes letters and digits compactly and every scanner reads it.

Most small shops keep paper. It survives oil, works when the Wi-Fi does not and gives the operator something to hold with the drawing. The practical pattern is a printed card with a barcode, plus a scanning point at each work centre or a shared tablet. The paper carries the instructions and the sign-off; the scans carry the data. Fully paperless works well when every work centre has a screen and the shop has good coverage; otherwise it fails quietly, with operators writing on scraps of paper and entering later. Pick the method that will be followed on a bad day, not the one that looks best in a demo.

Printing the card without the BOM revision, so the operator works from an old drawing. Leaving no scrap box, so scrap is never recorded and the job cost looks better than it is. Making the card the only record of labour, so costing waits for the card to come back. Issuing one card for a hundred pieces that split across three machines, so nobody knows where the other sixty are. And the most common: asking operators to write times nobody ever reads. If a field is never used downstream, remove it.