New production orders from a spreadsheet straight to the shop floor Telegram chat

New production orders from a spreadsheet straight to the shop floor Telegram chat#

In many manufacturing companies the plan lives in a spreadsheet. The office adds an order, and the shop floor learns about it by phone, from a printout, or only when someone asks what to do next. This n8n workflow does one thing: every new order lands in a Telegram chat the supervisor already has on their phone.

It is deliberately small, six nodes. All the logic sits in one code node and one sheet column.

State lives in the sheet, not in n8n#

The workflow does not remember what it sent. The sheet does: the Announced column gets yes once the order has gone to the chat. The next run skips those rows.

const pending = rows.filter(r => {
  const flag = String(r[COL.status] ?? '').trim().toLowerCase();
  const hasId = String(r[COL.id] ?? '').trim() !== '';
  return hasId && flag !== DONE;
});

That makes the state visible and easy to fix by hand. Clear the cell and the order goes out again.

Most urgent first#

Each order gets the number of days to its due date. Orders due within urgentDays (2 by default) get a red dot, and the list is sorted by the nearest due date. On the shop floor what matters is what burns today, not alphabetical order.

🔴 ORDER 2026-114
Product: R-200 shelving unit
Quantity: 40
Station: Welding
Due: 2026-11-07  (2 days)
Priority: A

One message per order, not a combined report. The supervisor can reply to a specific order in a thread.

Configuration#

Column names live in the settings node, so the sheet does not have to adapt to the workflow.

Limitations#

The order is Telegram first, then the sheet update. If the message goes out and the update fails, the order is sent again on the next run. We chose a duplicate over a lost order.

The date is read with new Date(), so ISO dates (2026-11-07) work and the Polish format 07.11.2026 does not. Orders in that column go out without the day count and without the urgent flag.

A change to an order that was already announced (a different quantity, a moved due date) does not trigger a new message. That would need a version column or a comparison with the previous state.

Running every 15 minutes means up to 15 minutes of delay and reading the whole sheet each time. With thousands of rows, filter by status in the query itself.

When it does not make sense#

If there are a few orders a day and the office and shop floor share a room, just say it. The workflow makes sense when they are separate and the plan changes several times a day. When the spreadsheet starts to crack and the shop floor needs a screen with the queue, statuses and work time, that is a production management system. Notifications like this one are also part of our n8n implementations, and for broader process work see process automation.