The 8:00 AM Production Meeting in 90% of Factories Across the Country

8:00 AM, boardroom, seventh floor. Seven people around a table with laptops.

Jim from Operations starts: "So what did we produce yesterday on Line 3?"

Silence. Joe searches in Excel. Fred shifts in his chair, folds his arms and mumbles, "Why are we still using Excel?" He looks at the clock. He knows this will be a long one, like yesterday and the day before, because skilled people are again being forced to act as human dashboards.

Thirty minutes later everyone knows what they could have read in 30 seconds in their own offices, yet Fred's agony is far from over. These issues have already been discussed in multiple meetings before. The frustration builds as he thinks of all the future meetings that will be held about the exact same issues which now have become routine. 

Even worse is Fred's certainty that the rest of the meeting will be spent answering more questions like: "What happened yesterday? How many did we produce? Where are we stuck?" Each person will report on output, scrap, downtime and staffing from yesterday - reading out numbers that should already be on a screen. Forty-five minutes in, Fred is calculating how many report-discussing meetings he will have to attend for the rest of his working life until retirement. He scowls at the spreadsheet in front of him, unable to prove that much of this discussion is based on old or wrong data.

Next to him, Sandy from Finance tries not to show her desperation. As usual, problems have stayed hidden until the meeting. Time and money could have been saved if the information had been available when the problems occurred. Now she will have to write a report on the issue to the MD. Most of her time is spent writing reports on reports. She is doing her own calculation: 7 people x 30 minutes x 5 days = 17.5 hours of salary per week just to share numbers, some of them too late - and that is on a good day.

Back at his desk, after an hour-and-a-half of shared reports with no clear solutions, no ownership assigned, no plans to track actions and no deadlines, Fred's manager nods approvingly: "These regular meetings are important. We must keep it up; they show the system is working."

What his manager is really saying is that reporting meetings disguised as problem-solving meetings are acceptable. What he should be saying is: there should be better operational visibility, reducing management overhead. Also improved decision-making, resulting in time and cost savings.

There are only two types of meetings:

•  Reporting meetings: Purpose is to gather information. Who did what, what is the output, what is late.

•  Problem-solving meetings: Purpose is to decide and act on information that is already known.

Jim, Fred and Sandy have discovered that many production meetings are of the first kind, wasting time and effort because they revolve around gathering information that should already have been visible to everybody. They also have weak follow-up systems, necessitating more of the same meetings. Worst of all is the hidden cost: frustration, health issues, loss of loyalty and lack of job satisfaction.

What if...

•  Output, downtime, scrap, open orders and blockers were visible at a glance on a Flōware dashboard before the meeting, and the meeting started with: "The dashboard already tells us what happened. What are we going to do about the 2 red blockers?"

•  Employees could be solving problems because they knew exactly what the issues were when they entered the meeting, shifting from a "reporting meeting" to an "action-driven meeting"?

•  The new twelve-minute agenda looked like this:

○  0-2 min: Look at board - green / red instantly visible

○  2-10 min: Only discuss reds - What is the root cause? Who owns it? When is it fixed?

○  10-12 min: Confirm priorities for today.

•  And lastly... what if physical meetings were not even necessary? For Fred's sake?

Conclusion

The best production meeting is the shortest one, because the information did its job before anyone entered the room.

This is exactly why we built Flōware - to make key production information visible at the touch of a button, so your team can stop reporting on production and start producing.