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Every station is busy and the orders are still late

Most plants measure how busy each station is. Almost none measure how long work sits still between them. This is the sheet I fill in when I walk a line, and the questions I answer at the end of it.

• 1Every step, in flow order. What each step can finish in an hour, what is queued in front of it, and how long the oldest item has waited.
• 2What we release into the line. Release rate against the slowest step. The difference is queue growth, every hour, all shift.
• 3Work waiting off the floor. Orders stuck in a system, waiting for a decision, an approval or a quality release.
• 4The three questions. Where is work waiting, what limits completed output, and why are we releasing more than we can finish.
• 5The first week, in order. Control release, protect the constraint, improve it, then walk the line again because the constraint moves.

It takes about twenty minutes to walk one line. No software, no maturity model, no capital request. Queues do not lie the way reports do.