Hour-by-Hour Boards: Catch a Bad Shift at 9am

At a plastics site in the East Midlands a few years ago, the production manager could tell you within two minutes exactly how the previous week had gone. He kept meticulous records. The problem was, he was always telling you about last week. His hour-by-hour board was filled in religiously at the end of each shift, which meant it was a tidy summary of things that had already gone wrong and could no longer be fixed.

That is not what the board is for.

The board is a real-time trigger, not a post-shift report

An hour-by-hour board does one thing: it forces a comparison between what you planned to make and what you actually made, every hour, while there is still time to do something about it. The moment you fall behind, the board should prompt a question. Not “what happened?” but “what are we doing about it right now?”

If a cell targets 40 units an hour and only gets 31 in the first hour, that is a nine-unit hole. Over an eight-hour shift, if nothing changes, you are looking at a 72-unit shortfall. Catch it at hour one, and if the cause is something fixable, say a tool change that ran long, you can recover. You cannot recover at 5pm when the shift is done and the shortfall is written in ink.

Why so many boards fail

The usual problem is not that people forget to update the board. It is that nobody acts on what it says. The numbers go in, the supervisor sees a red box, nods, and moves on. By lunchtime, three boxes are red, nobody quite knows why, and the post-shift debrief becomes an exercise in explaining a bad day rather than preventing one.

This happens for a few reasons. First, there is no clear owner. Everybody can see the board, which in practice means nobody feels responsible for responding to it. Second, there is no defined response process. When a box goes red, what exactly happens? Who is called? What is checked first? If the answer is “it depends” or “we will see how it looks after a couple of hours,” you have already lost the benefit.

Third, and most commonly, the targets on the board are wrong. If the hourly target was copied from a spreadsheet built three years ago and never updated, it is either too easy or too hard. Either way, the signal is noise.

What the first two hours tell you

The first two hours of a shift carry a disproportionate amount of information. Start-up losses, handover problems, absenteeism affecting manning, a machine that did not come back from the night before. All of these show up in hours one and two. Catch them there and you have six hours to compensate. Catch them at the end-of-shift meeting and you have a story.

A useful discipline is to build a short checkpoint at the end of hour two specifically to look at the pattern, not just the number. Two red boxes for the same reason is a pattern. Two red boxes for different reasons is chaos, and chaos needs a different response than a single recurring fault.

The conversation the board should prompt

When a supervisor sees the board going red, the question is not “can we catch up?” It is “do we know why, and is the cause still active?” If the cause is gone, plan to recover. If the cause is still running, escalate. The board is only useful if it connects to a decision.

That decision does not need to be complicated. It might be “call maintenance,” or “pull in a second operator for the next two hours,” or “adjust the target and flag it for the shift review.” What it cannot be is nothing.

The board should also be readable from three metres away. If you need to walk up and squint at pencilled numbers to understand what it is telling you, it is not doing its job. Colour coding, clear target versus actual columns, and a simple reason-for-loss field are enough.

Getting the basics right before adding complexity

None of this requires software, although boards that feed into a live OEE system do give you better data over time. Before you think about digital integration, get the paper version working properly. Make sure targets are current and realistic, make sure there is a named person responsible for each hour, and make sure there is an agreed response when a box goes red.

If you want a structured way to understand where your losses are actually coming from before you put numbers on a board, the losses calculator at losses.cadencestandard.com is a good starting point. And if you are working through lean implementation more broadly rather than picking up tools one at a time, the six-step framework at /six/ gives hour-by-hour boards their proper place in a sequence that builds from the ground up.