Abstract: A method for controlling work on a job in a system for producing a plurality of jobs, each of which includes at least one piece of work, each piece of work requiring at least one operation to be performed, the system having several types of stations at which the operations are performed has the following steps. It first accepts into the system a set of job requirements for a job, the set of job requirements including requirements for each of the constituent pieces of work of the job. The method then creates an electronic image of the requirements for each piece of work, the image having a unique image identifier. Next, a set of control information for each piece of work is maintained that includes the unique image identifier and a unique identifier for the pieces of work.