u/Due-Independent8497

Visited the Sony Center but they don't carry the XM4, the guy there kept pushing me towards the ULT Wear, but after doing my research I'm not willing to compromise. The XM4 has better noise cancellation, fits my budget, and is exactly what I want.

The problem is, most stores are either out of stock, untrustworthy, or listing it way above 70k which is just not happening.

If anyone knows a reliable place to buys these, please drop it below.

I need some real talk from people who’ve been through this.

My situation: I started this business in 2016 because I loved the craft, hand-forged metal products for international brands. I’m the “product development guy.” I get excited about new alloys, improving forging techniques, designing better finishes. That’s what I’m good at and honestly, what I want to be doing.

Fast forward to now: I’m spending 80% of my time on operational stuff I’m terrible at. I’m literally suffering through my own success.

Here’s the complexity I’m dealing with:

•	34 in-house workers across our finishing unit (18 hand-polishers, 6 packaging staff, plus QC, laser operator, supervisor, etc.)

•	Assembly is outsourced to a vendor (they deliver fully assembled products to us)

•	Our stages: Hand Polishing → Outsourced Finishing (leather/colouring) → Laser Branding → Ultrasonic Cleaning → Packaging → Dispatch (6+ stages total)

•	4–7 active brand customers

•	Typical order: 1,000 units with 50+ SKU variations (different sizes, materials, finishes)

•	This is highly labor-intensive work hand polishing alone involves 18 contractors working at different paces

Right now, I’m manually calculating delivery timelines in my head for every customer inquiry. No visual system for “what’s in polishing vs. what’s at the leather vendor vs. what’s ready to ship.” I know our capacity numbers now, but I have no process to turn that into actual order scheduling across all these moving parts.

I’m hiring an Operations Manager next month to take this off my plate, but I want to give him the right framework to work with not just dump my mess on him.

My questions for the community:

1.	How do you schedule orders through 6+ production stages with 1,000-unit batches and 50+ SKU variations? Do you use software, whiteboards, Excel templates, something else?

2.	How did YOU make the transition from being hands-on with the product to managing labor-intensive operations systematically? What changed for you?

3.	If you use scheduling software, what do you use? I’ve heard monday.com, Airtable, Smartsheet, Trello mentioned but I don’t know which actually works for production with this many workers and stages (vs. just project management).

4.	What I’m visualizing: A Gantt chart-style timeline where I can see all active orders, when they’ll hit each stage based on worker capacity, and click on one to see its current progress. Does this exist without spending $50K on enterprise ERP?

I’m at the point where I need to either build a system or keep playing human calculator while my product development ideas collect dust.

Anyone been through this? How did you get your time back to focus on what you’re actually good at?

Thanks for reading.