A print factory floor doesn't care about your elegant abstractions. It cares whether the right job sheet prints, the right barcode scans, and the order moves to the next station without a human chasing it. Here's how I built a system that handled a thousand of those a day without falling over.
The breakthrough was designing around physical stations — artwork, print, finishing, dispatch — instead of CRUD tables. Each order is a state machine that can only move forward, and every transition is logged. When something goes wrong, you can replay exactly where it stalled.
Every job sheet carried a barcode. Scanning it was the only way to advance an order, which meant the system's state always matched the physical reality on the floor — no more 'the computer says it shipped' arguments.
public function advance(Order $order, Station $to): void
{
abort_unless($order->canMoveTo($to), 409, 'Invalid transition');
DB::transaction(function () use ($order, $to) {
$order->transitions()->create(['to' => $to->id]);
$order->update(['station_id' => $to->id]);
});
}Keep the write path dead simple and fast. Put the cleverness in reporting, where latency doesn't matter. And make the system match the floor, not the other way around — the people doing the work won't change their process for your schema.