Putting Your SQDC Board on a TV: What Changes and What Doesn't

A shop hangs a 55-inch screen above the cell, puts the SQDC board on it, and expects the huddle to change. Two weeks later the same metric is red, the same supervisor is shrugging, and the only difference is that now everyone can see the shrug from 20 feet. The TV did what a TV does. It did not do what the board is for. Before you buy the bracket, it helps to be clear about which problems an SQDC board TV display fixes and which ones it just makes bigger.

What a wall display actually fixes

Three things, and they are all about visibility.

Legibility at distance. A whiteboard with one-inch marker letters reads from about six feet. A screen with two-inch text reads from 20. That is the difference between a board that only the person standing at it can see and a board the whole cell can glance at from their machine.

No walking to the board. On a 60-machine floor with 17 cells, a supervisor who has to walk to each board to check the hour-by-hour spends 20 minutes a shift walking. A screen at the end of each aisle turns that into a glance.

Shift-to-shift continuity. On a whiteboard, somebody wipes first shift's hours at 3 PM so second shift has room. Second shift walks in to a blank board and no idea whether the day is ahead or behind. A screen holds yesterday and this morning side by side without anyone erasing anything.

What it does not fix

A red box with no owner. A TV makes that red box larger and brighter, and that is all. If the huddle rule on the whiteboard was loose, it is loose on the screen too. Every red still needs a name and a date written against it before the huddle ends, and the person running the huddle still has to ask "who owns it, and by when" out loud. If the board was theater on a whiteboard, it is theater in 4K.

Data entry. Someone still has to put the hour count in. The screen shows what it is given, and a screen that shows nothing new since 9 AM is worse than a whiteboard with blanks, because it looks authoritative. Put a "last updated" time on the display and make it part of the huddle: anything older than an hour gets asked about.

Mounting height, angle, and font size

Bottom edge of the screen at about six feet, above heads, tilted down 10 to 15 degrees. Higher than that and people stop looking up. Lower and a pallet blocks it.

Font size follows a simple rule: one inch of text height per 10 feet of viewing distance. For a cell where the far machine is 20 feet away, that is two-inch letters, which on a 55-inch screen leaves room for roughly eight to ten rows of data. If you find yourself shrinking the font to fit more rows, you are building a board for the person standing under it, not for the cell.

Colors carry further than numbers. A green or red block reads from 40 feet. A number reads from 20. Let the status color do the work at distance and let the number confirm it up close.

Walk to the far end of the cell with the shop lights on and check for glare before you drill the holes. A screen facing a bay door is unreadable from 10 AM to 2 PM.

What to show and what to hide

Show three things: today's hour-by-hour with the running gap at the bottom, yesterday's four SQDC colors, and the open 3Cs as owner name and due date only. That is the whole screen.

Hide everything else. Monthly trend charts, OEE to two decimals, cost variance, anything that needs a sentence of explanation. Those belong on the tier 2 board or in the weekly review. One screen per cell, six metrics at most, and no rotating pages. If the display cycles through five views every 15 seconds, nobody knows when to look and everyone stops looking.

Who updates it, and when

The same person who updated the whiteboard: the lead operator at the top of the hour, in under 30 seconds. The supervisor sets the SQDC colors before the huddle, not during it. If updating the screen takes longer than updating the whiteboard did, the habit will die in the same three weeks it always dies in.

Where the whiteboard is still the better tool

Keep a whiteboard next to the screen for problem solving. A 3C worked out with a marker, standing next to the machine, with the operator drawing the part, beats anything on a display. The screen is for status. The whiteboard is for thinking.

And do not put the screen up until the whiteboard habit has held for 30 days. A display does not create a habit. It only broadcasts whichever one you already have.

If the habit is holding and you want to see what it looks like on a screen that keeps yesterday, today's hours, and the open 3Cs in one view, the demo runs on sample data, no signup needed: Try the live demo →