Shift board with safety, quality, delivery, inventory and productivity rows (SQDIP)

The performance grid pointed at a production area, using the five rows the letter set is named for: safety, quality, delivery, inventory and productivity. One square per shift, or per day where the line runs one shift. Green met the rule, red missed it, blue means the number is not in yet, and there is no amber because a third colour is where an uncomfortable miss goes to be called "nearly fine". It is the same method and the same engine as the performance grid — what changes is that the rows are fixed, and that fixing them buys something real on a site with many cells: anyone can walk up to any board and read it without translation, and a plant manager walking the floor sees the same five rows in the same order everywhere. That is the honest argument for the letter set, and it is a good one where the five letters each map to something the cell can actually move inside a shift. Where they do not — an inside sales team has no meaningful inventory row — forcing them teaches people the board is a form to fill in, and the plain performance grid with that team's own critical few is the better tool. The shift cadence is not a detail. On a line running two shifts, marking once a day averages the two together, and a problem that belongs to one shift disappears into a green. The worked example below is exactly that case: thirteen reds, every one of them on a night shift, which is invisible at any cadence longer than the shift itself.

The measures, their rules and owners

One row per letter, in the same order on every board on the site. Safety is almost always a judgement rather than a number — any injury, any near miss, any guard or interlock bypassed, and the square is red. Quality, delivery, inventory and productivity take a standing number the area can actually move: first pass yield, schedule attainment, work in progress at handover, good units per labour hour. Name the source precisely enough that two shifts cannot read it differently, and give every row an owner who is a person on the floor rather than a department.

Cadence — the period a square covers

One square per shift wherever more than one shift runs. This is the single most important choice on the board: marking once a day averages the shifts together, and the difference between them is very often the finding. A cell running one shift can mark once a day. Anything longer than a day and this stops being daily management and becomes reporting.

The squares, and the reason behind every red

Mark at handover, by the shift that worked it, in the two minutes before they go home. A number colours its own square against the standing goal; safety is marked by judgement. Every red gets one line of fact — what happened, never who — written by the people who were there. That line cannot be reconstructed the next morning, and it is worth more than the colour: when one changeover puts five rows red at once, only the reasons show that it was one problem rather than five.

What is being done, by whom, by when

Containment first, that same shift if the next shift is at risk — a setter held over, a jam-clearing procedure re-walked, a relief operator called. Then the permanent countermeasure once the cause is understood, and keep the two apart so overtime cover is never mistaken for a solved problem. Cap what is open at once. Containment that relies on a person working extra hours is a debt, and the date on the permanent fix is when you stop paying it.

Colours, discipline checks and the reason Pareto (computed)

Computed for you: the colours, reds with no reason, reds with nothing being done about their cause, and the Pareto of reasons. A red whose cause is already being worked counts as covered even when no countermeasure names that exact square — one bad changeover throws several reds, and a countermeasure attacks the cause rather than each square it produced. Nothing to enter here.

What the grid says

Drafted from the board actually marked, and grounded only in what it computes.

The example below is an assembly cell on two shifts, marked per shift for a week. Fifty squares, thirteen red — and every single red is on a night shift. Not one day shift missed anything. Averaged across a day most of those misses vanish into a green, and the cell looks like it has a quality problem and a delivery problem and an inventory problem; read shift by shift it has one problem wearing four measures' clothes. Ten of the thirteen reds trace to a changeover run without a trained setter, which is why one Tuesday night shows red on all five rows at once, including a bypassed interlock. Note what the repeat-miss prompt found: nothing. Reds alternate with green day shifts, so no row ever shows two in a row — the reasons found the pattern and the streak rule could not. One red has no reason recorded, and it is also the only one with nothing being done about it. Those are the same fact.

• Marking once a day when the line runs two shifts

  It averages the shifts together and hides the commonest finding on a multi-shift line: that the shifts are not the same. A problem belonging to nights disappears into a green day, and the board quietly stops being able to see the thing most worth seeing.

• Forcing a letter that does not fit

  An inventory row on a team with no inventory teaches everyone that the board is a form to be completed rather than a tool to be used, and that lesson spreads to the rows that do matter. Four honest rows beat five with a passenger.

• Treating the safety row as a statistic

  It is the one row where the rule is a judgement and the right response to a red is always to go and look, that shift. A safety square that gets discussed at the end of the week alongside productivity has already been mis-framed.

• Calling overtime cover a fix

  Holding a setter over is good containment and a person paying for it with their evening. Log it as containment with a date on the permanent countermeasure, or the cell runs on goodwill until the goodwill runs out.

• The board becoming a report to the plant manager

  Once its audience is upward the numbers get managed instead of the work, and the shift that marks honestly looks worse than the shift that does not. The crew marks its own squares for its own use; anyone above reads the same board rather than asking for a version of it.

• Five reds from one cause read as five problems

  A bad changeover can put every row red in the same shift. Counting colours makes that look like a cell falling apart; reading reasons shows one problem with one countermeasure. This is exactly why the reason line is worth more than the square.