Shop-floor visibility: why your team keeps asking where the job is
There is a specific, recognisable moment in a lot of factories: someone needs to know whether a job has cleared inspection, so they walk over and ask. Multiply that by every job, every shift, everyone who needs to know, and you have a substantial amount of time spent moving information that should already be visible.
The cost is larger than it looks
Each interruption costs the person asking and the person answering, and the second cost is the expensive one — you are usually interrupting someone mid-task on the floor. The information is also stale the moment it is given, and it does not reach anyone else who needed it. The same question gets asked again an hour later.
What a live board actually is
A screen on the wall showing current job status, refreshing itself. No login, no clicking, nothing for anyone to maintain. Someone updates a job at their station and the board reflects it within seconds. The point is not the technology — it is that status becomes something you glance at rather than something you ask for.
What to put on it
- Jobs currently in each department, so bottlenecks are visible rather than inferred.
- Anything blocked or waiting, flagged clearly — this is the highest-value item on most boards.
- Jobs due today or overdue.
- Who is assigned, where that matters.
- Nothing else. Boards fail by showing too much.
What not to put on it
Individual productivity metrics displayed publicly change behaviour, and usually not in the direction intended. People optimise for the number on the wall rather than the outcome, and it corrodes trust in the system as a whole. Keep boards about work status, not about people.
The prerequisite most people skip
A board is only as good as the data behind it. If updating job status is slow or awkward, operators will not do it consistently, the board will drift out of date, and within a fortnight people will stop trusting it and go back to walking over and asking. The input side matters more than the display side — status updates need to take seconds at a workstation, on a tablet, with large touch targets and no fiddly forms.
Seeing one working
We built live boards into a production system for a UK electronics manufacturer, covering six departments from kit room through to dispatch. ProdFlow is our demo build of that system with sample data — free to click around, no sign-up. It is the fastest way to judge whether the idea fits your floor.