An hour-by-hour board (also called a day-by-hour or production tracking board) is the line-side display where each hour’s planned output, actual output, and the reason for any gap are recorded as the shift unfolds. Its premise is simple: a shift that discovers at 14:00 it is 180 units behind can still act; a shift that discovers it in tomorrow’s report can only explain.
Losses are lumpy and memory is smooth. At end of shift, six small stoppages blur into "a rough day"; at the hour, each one has a name while it is still fresh. Hourly reasons are the raw material for Pareto analysis, and they catch drift a daily number hides: a line quietly running 8 percent slow every hour looks like random shortfall daily, and like a speed-loss signature hourly, the same losses OEE decomposes (see reduced speed versus minor stops).
Plan: 120 units per hour. The 08:00 and 09:00 rows read 118 and 121, on plan. The 10:00 row reads 74, reason: film splice failures after a roll change. Because the miss is visible at 10:05, not tomorrow, the team lead pulls maintenance immediately; the splicer tension is corrected by 10:40, and the tier process later assigns a roll-supplier check. The remaining hours read 119, 122, 117, 120, and the shift closes 49 units down instead of the 300-plus a slow-burning splice problem typically costs when discovered in the weekly review. The board did not fix the splicer; it collapsed the time between problem and response from a day to half an hour.
The paper board’s virtue is ownership: the team writes it, stands at it, argues at it. Its weakness is arithmetic and afterlife: numbers transcribed late, reasons generic, sheets filed into oblivion. The digital version, fed by automatic production counting, keeps the human reason-giving while making actuals honest and history analyzable. The failure mode to avoid in both: a board maintained for management rather than by the team, filled in at 05:45 for the whole night.
Fabrico is the digital engine behind the board: real-time counts and line status feed plan-versus-actual automatically, operators attach reasons to the gaps the system already sees (including the micro-stops nobody would have logged by hand), and every hourly reason accumulates into the same loss analysis that drives OEE improvement and maintenance priorities. The conversation stays at the line; the counting stops depending on it. EU-built, with EU data residency.
The team at the line, operator or team leader, at the hour. The moment a supervisor fills it in retroactively, the reasons become guesses and the board becomes reporting theater. Automation can supply the numbers; the reasons must stay with the people who saw them.
Andon signals a problem the moment it happens and summons help; the hour-by-hour board tracks cumulative performance and its causes across the shift. They complement: andon handles the acute event, the board catches the chronic drift and keeps the record.
Daily review at the tier meeting: recurring reasons become actions with owners, and the top loss of the week gets a proper countermeasure. A board whose reasons are never read teaches the team to stop writing real ones.
Want plan-versus-actual filled by the line itself, with reasons that feed real analysis? Book a Fabrico demo to see hour-by-hour truth without the manual counting.
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