What a GM Actually Looks at at 6 AM

A plant manager's morning can get eaten by 40 numbers before the first cup of coffee. Most of them do not change what you do today. Three of them do. If you are trying to sort out which plant manager daily metrics are worth looking at before the floor is fully running, here is the short version: yesterday's safety, yesterday's biggest delivery gap and whether it has an owner, and today's first-hour signal. Five minutes, and you know whether the day needs an intervention or just a walk.

The three numbers

Yesterday's safety. Incidents and near misses, both shifts. If it is zero and zero, move on. If there is a near miss, that is the number that matters, because a near miss with a report is a shop that is paying attention, and a near miss without one is a shop that is not. On a 60-machine floor over two shifts, a week with no near misses reported is a warning, not a win.

Yesterday's biggest delivery gap, and whether it has an owner. Not every gap. The biggest one. Which cell, how many units short, and is there a name written next to it. The name matters more than the number. A cell 40 units short with an owner and a 3C open is being handled. A cell 12 units short with nothing written next to it is the one you are going to think about all morning.

Today's first-hour signal. If first shift starts at 5, by 6 the first hour is on the board. Two things to check: is it filled in, and is it on plan. A blank first hour tells you nobody is updating. A red first hour tells you setup, material, or someone did not show up. Those are different problems, and neither one needs you yet.

If your shift starts at 6, do this at 7. The point is the first hour, not the clock.

What not to look at before 8 AM

Month-to-date OEE. Scrap dollars. On-time delivery percent. Labor efficiency. Cost variance against budget.

These are real numbers and you should know them. But nothing you do at 6:15 changes any of them, and looking at them early trains you to react to noise: one bad day in a 22-day month is a 4.5 percent swing in everything. Read them weekly with the supervisors and monthly with finance, when there is enough data behind them to mean something.

Email is on this list too. Whoever emailed you at 11 PM has set your agenda for the day if you open it before you have walked the floor. Walk first.

How the five minutes go

6:00. Walk the boards, or stand where you can see them. On a 17-cell floor, that is about 20 seconds per board on foot, or three minutes if you can see most of them from one spot.

Safety: one glance per board. You are looking for anything other than a zero.

Delivery: find yesterday's biggest red. Stop at one board, read the name next to it or notice there is not one.

First hour: scan the top row of every hour-by-hour column. Filled, blank, green, red.

Write three lines on an index card. Yesterday's safety. The cell and the gap and the owner. Any blank or red first hours. Done by 6:05, and you go into the 6:30 tier 2 huddle with something specific to ask instead of "how is everyone doing."

When one of the three is red

Safety red: go there first, before anything else, including the huddle. Talk to the person, then the supervisor. The question is not "what happened," it is "what changed." A near miss that only came up in conversation and never got written down is a bigger problem than the near miss itself, and that is the thing to fix today.

Delivery gap with no owner: this is the intervention, and it is small. Do not solve the gap. Find the supervisor before 6:30 and ask who owns it and by when. Writing a name takes 30 seconds. The fact that it did not happen yesterday is the actual signal, and it usually means the huddle has gone soft.

Delivery gap with an owner: leave it alone. The process has it. Check at the afternoon tier 2 or tomorrow morning. If you step in on a gap that already has an owner, you have just told the owner it is not really theirs.

First hour red: wait for hour two. One red at 6 AM is a setup or a late start. Two reds in a row at 7 AM means go stand at the cell for 10 minutes and watch. Do not call. Go.

First hour blank: this is the one to fix today, and the fix is the habit, not the number. Ask the lead at the huddle what was going on in that hour. Blank hours are usually the hours where something went wrong.

Why only three

Everything else on the floor has an owner below you. If you look at 40 numbers every morning, you become the owner of 40 numbers, and the supervisors learn to wait for you. Three numbers keep you at the edge of the process, where you are the escalation and not the tracker. That is where a GM is useful at 6 AM.

If you want to see yesterday's safety, today's hour-by-hour and the open problems for a department on one screen before you have walked anywhere, the demo runs on sample data, no signup needed: Try the live demo →