Counting Part Families in Work Orders: From “I Think” to “I Know”

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Most manufacturing work orders don’t just list parts one by one. They contain families of parts — shelf panels, brackets, rails, covers, and so on — that share geometry and processing steps. You may know roughly how many of each family you’re building this week, but when somebody asks for real numbers, the answer is often a guess.

This post walks through a practical way to go from “I think we have about 30 shelf panels” to “we have exactly 27 shelf panels and 14 front panels in this work order”. We’ll define part families, turn that into repeatable rules, and then use a rule-based checker to generate counts automatically.

If you haven’t seen the earlier articles in this series, you may want to read them as background:

What is a part family?

In manufacturing, a part family is a collection of parts that are similar enough in design or processing that it makes sense to group them together. They often share:

Similar geometry (for example, flat panels with holes)
Similar material and thickness
Similar routing steps (same cutting, forming, coating operations)

By grouping parts into families, you can plan material, tooling, work cells, and capacity around those families instead of treating every part as unique. The same idea applies when you look at work‑order spreadsheets: knowing how many parts belong to each family helps you plan the week.

Why part‑family counts matter in work‑order review

When you review a work order, you’re rarely interested in every line equally. You’re trying to answer questions like:

How many panels are in this job by material and thickness?
Do we have enough brackets to justify a dedicated fixture or setup?
Is this work order heavy on stainless or on mild steel?

Clear counts by part family help with:

Capacity planning: matching families to cells, machines, and fixtures.
Material and purchasing: understanding which families will consume which material and finishes.
Scheduling: grouping similar work to minimize changeovers.

If the only way to answer those questions is to filter, scroll, and manually tally in Excel, it’s easy to slip back to gut feel instead of data.

Common ways people try to count part families

Most shops already have some way to count part families in work orders, but there are typical problems:

Manual scanning: someone scrolls through the spreadsheet and writes tallies on paper. This doesn’t scale and is error‑prone.
Ad‑hoc filters: you filter the Part Number or Description column on a keyword, jot down the count, then repeat for the next family. It’s slow and easy to miss rows if the filter logic isn’t consistent.
One‑off Excel formulas: COUNTIF/COUNTIFS formulas that someone built once and nobody wants to maintain or modify.
Pivot tables: powerful, but can be confusing to users who only open spreadsheets a few times a week.

The recurring theme is that the logic for what belongs in a family lives in someone’s head or in a fragile spreadsheet. It’s hard to reuse and hard to trust.

Start by defining your part‑family rules

Before you touch any tool, write down how you recognize each family. For a sheet‑metal job, your rules might look like this:

Shelf panels: Part Number starts with SHF- or Description contains Shelf panel
Front panels: Description contains Front panel
Support brackets: Part Number starts with SUP- or Description contains Support bracket
Rear rails: Part Number starts with RAI- or Description contains Rear rail

Some families are easiest to define by part‑number prefix, others by keywords in the description, and some by a combination of both. The key is to make the rules explicit and stable enough that you can apply them to every work order from that customer or product line.

Once you have a list, you can turn it into formulas, pivot tables, or rule‑based filters.

Doing it in Excel: quick example

If you prefer to stay entirely in Excel, a simple pattern is to add one helper column per family and use COUNTIFS or text functions. For example, assuming Part Numbers are in column A and Descriptions in column B:

Shelf panels: =IF(OR(LEFT(A2,4)="SHF-",ISNUMBER(SEARCH("Shelf panel",B2))),"Shelf panel","")
Front panels: =IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("Front panel",B2)),"Front panel","")

Then you can run a pivot table on that helper column or use COUNTIF to get totals.

This works, but you still have to:

Insert helper columns into every new export
Copy formulas far enough down the sheet
Make sure nobody breaks the formulas when editing

If you handle a lot of work orders, it can be easier to move this logic into a dedicated checker and keep Excel as the final output.

Counting part families with Work Order Checker

Work Order Checker is a Windows desktop tool that reads work‑order spreadsheets, lets you define simple search rules, and shows how many rows matched each rule. Instead of burying logic in formulas, you create rules like:

"Part Number" contains "SHF"
"Part Number" contains "SUP-"
"Description" contains "Shelf panel"
"Description" contains "Front panel"

Each rule gets its own filtered grid, and the Statistics window lists every rule with the number of rows it found. You get an instant overview of how many parts in the work order belong to each family.

The basic workflow looks like this:

Open the work‑order file. Load an Excel, CSV, TSV, or text file. The app reads the header row and detects delimiters automatically.
Pick the key columns. Add Part Number, Description, Material, and any other columns you want to review.
Add strings and rules. Type in the prefixes and keywords that identify your families, then create “Column contains String” rules from them.
Open the Statistics window. Review a simple list: each rule and the number of rows matched.
Export results. Generate an Excel workbook containing an All Rows sheet, one sheet per rule, and a statistics sheet you can attach to the job packet.

Because the rules live in the app instead of in each spreadsheet, you can reuse the same setup for every work order in that product family or for that customer.

Worked example: shelf and front panels

Imagine a work order export where each row includes a part number and description. You’re interested in two families:

Shelf panels (flat panels used as shelves)
Front panels (visible front faces of an assembly)

In Work Order Checker you might define:

Rule 1: "Part Number" contains "SHF"
Rule 2: "Description" contains "Shelf panel"
Rule 3: "Description" contains "Front panel"

After loading the file, the Statistics window might show something like:

"Part Number" contains "SHF" — 10 rows
"Description" contains "Shelf panel" — 10 rows
"Description" contains "Front panel" — 6 rows

That gives you three quick facts:

You have 10 shelf‑panel items in this work order.
They span 10 individual rows (so you may have different sizes, thicknesses, or revisions).
You have 6 front panels, which may be spread across multiple assemblies.

From there you can:

Check that material and thickness make sense for those counts
Confirm routing operations are consistent across the family
Use the exported per‑rule sheets as input for cell scheduling or nesting

Making part‑family counting repeatable

The real payoff comes when you turn this into a repeatable process:

Save your columns, strings, and rules as a layout template inside Work Order Checker.
Use that template every time you receive a similar work order from the same customer or for the same product line.
Share the template file with colleagues so everyone is using the same family definitions.

Now, instead of setting up filters or formulas from scratch, your review process becomes:

Load new work‑order file
Apply the template
Open Statistics and export results

That’s the difference between scrambling on each new spreadsheet and having a simple, shared standard for counting part families.

Next steps

If you want to go deeper into rule‑based work‑order analysis, check out these related articles:

When you’re ready to stop guessing how many parts each family has in the next job, download Work Order Checker, plug in your latest work‑order export, and let the Statistics window give you real numbers instead.