Four Minutes

Every plant hands over between shifts, and every plant is satisfied that the handover works, because the plant keeps running. Watch one. Count what gets said, and then count what gets asked.

Four minutes is what the roster pays for, and four minutes is what it takes to transfer state: this one is down, that one is running, the material for the third arrives at ten. It is efficient and it is accurate. What does not fit in four minutes is the other half: what was tried on the machine that keeps stopping, what it sounded like, and what the operator who has run it for nine years suspects but would not write down.

Nobody designed the handover to lose that. It was designed as a status transfer, because status is what a plan needs and status is what a supervisor can act on. Suspicion has no field on the form and no place in a four-minute conversation, so it stays with the person who has it and goes home at the end of the shift.

The bill is the same fault being solved from scratch three times in a row, once per crew, each of them repeating the two easy checks the previous crew already made. On the fourth shift somebody who was there on the first walks past and says the thing everyone needed on Monday.

So there is one thing worth listening for at a shift change, and it takes no longer than the four minutes already paid for: does anybody say what they tried? A handover that only reports state makes every crew start the same problem from the beginning.

Where this shows up: Production turnaround — recovering delivery, quality and cost.