The shop floor wants a work order, not a dashboard
Walk into a plant that has just implemented a production system and look for the whiteboard. If the whiteboard is still there, and still current, the system has not been adopted — it is being kept alive by someone in the office entering yesterday's numbers.
2 min readOadbox
What the floor needs at the machine
An operator at a machine needs four things: what to make next, how many, what the specification is, and where to report what happened. That is the whole interface. Anything else on that screen is a distraction competing with a running job.
The office needs plan versus actual, WIP, scrap, utilisation and cost. Those are outputs. They should be computed from the four things the operator reported, never entered separately.
Reporting has to be cheaper than not reporting
If confirming a completed operation takes longer than writing it on the job card, the job card wins. This is not resistance to change; it is a rational response to an interface that costs more than the alternative.
The bar is low and specific: start and complete an operation in two interactions, on a shared terminal, with gloved hands, without a keyboard.
- Scan or select the job, confirm quantity good and quantity rejected.
- Reject reasons as a short fixed list, not free text.
- Downtime reported as a reason code with a start and stop.
- No login ceremony per transaction — badge or shared station with operator selection.
The routing is the product
A bill of materials tells you what goes in. The routing tells you what happens, in what order, on which machines, with what setup and cycle times. Costing, scheduling and capacity all derive from it.
Plants that skip routing definition because it is tedious end up with a system that can hold inventory and nothing else — and then wonder why the promised scheduling never materialised.
Start with one line
The plants that succeed run one line, one shift, for a month, with the whiteboard kept alongside as a check. When the two agree for three weeks, the whiteboard comes down and the second line starts.
The plants that struggle go live across the factory on the first of April because that was the date on the project plan.
Written by the Oadbox team. Something here not match how it works in your business? We would genuinely like to hear it — connect@oadbox.com.