Tier meetings are the short, stand-up meetings of a tiered daily management system: Tier 1 at the line at shift start, Tier 2 at the value stream or department, Tier 3 at plant leadership, each feeding the next. Their job is speed: a problem the line cannot solve reaches someone who can within hours, with data, instead of dying in a shift log.
The chain runs every day, same times, same places, same visual boards. By late morning, a problem born on night shift has either an owner and a date or a decision that it can wait, and everyone knows which.
The system lives or dies on one rule: every escalated item gets an owner, a date, and a visible status. The classic failure is the wallpaper board, yesterday’s numbers, nobody’s actions. The countermeasure is discipline over furniture: leaders ask about the aging item first, closed items are celebrated off the board, and anything older than its date gets escalated automatically. Where a physical problem needs deeper work, the item leaves the meeting and enters the improvement machinery: a gemba walk, an obeya review, or a kaizen event, and audit routines like kamishibai keep the standard honest between meetings.
Night shift logs three wrapper jams costing 47 minutes. Tier 1 at 06:15: the team confirms the jams clustered after film-roll changes and asks for maintenance help. Tier 2 at 07:00: maintenance sees the same film-change signature on a second line, suspects a supplier roll-width drift, and commits a fitter plus an incoming-material check by 14:00 with quality. Tier 3 at 09:00 hears only the summary: two lines, one suspected lot, contained, purchasing on notice. Elapsed time from problem to coordinated countermeasure: under 27 hours, most of it night shift. Without tiers, three separate operators file three separate notes and the pattern waits for the monthly review.
The board should show few numbers, owned by the team, refreshed daily: safety incidents and near misses, first-pass quality, delivery to schedule, and equipment performance, typically OEE or its worst loss. Trends beat snapshots; targets beat commentary. If the numbers arrive pre-digested from last week, the meeting manages history.
Tier meetings run on fresh, trustworthy numbers, and that is precisely what manual data collection cannot deliver at 06:15. Fabrico feeds the boards automatically: last-shift OEE, downtime coded by cause, and open maintenance items straight from the system, and maintenance requests raised in Tier 1 become real work orders with owners and status the Tier 2 board can display live. The meeting stays a meeting; the data pipeline stops being a 05:30 spreadsheet ritual. EU-built, with EU data residency.
Tier 1 in about 10 minutes, higher tiers 15 to 30. Standing up, at the board, at fixed times. Meetings that stretch are usually solving problems in the meeting instead of assigning them; the meeting routes work, it does not perform it.
Linkage and escalation. A single daily meeting gathers managers around yesterday. A tiered system starts where the work happens, connects levels within hours, and moves only unresolved items upward, so each level handles what only it can.
Yes, with fewer tiers. A two-tier version, line huddle plus a site huddle, preserves the essential mechanics: daily rhythm, visual status, and escalation with owners and dates.
Want tier boards fed by live production and maintenance data instead of morning spreadsheets? Book a Fabrico demo to see OEE and work order status flow straight to the shop floor conversation.
Connexion
Blog
