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Hour-by-Hour Boards: Catching a Bad Shift While It Can Still Be Saved

Hour-by-hour boards explained: how hourly plan-versus-actual tracking with reasons catches losses in real time, and a worked shift recovery example.

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.

The anatomy of the board

  • Plan per hour: derived from takt or the scheduled rate, adjusted for planned changeovers and breaks, honest hourly targets, not a daily number divided by eight.
  • Actual per hour: recorded at the hour, every hour, by the team.
  • Gap and reason: the load-bearing column: a short, specific cause for every miss, jam on the capper, waiting on material, short crew.
  • Response: what was done or escalated, connecting the board to andon-style help chains and the daily tier meeting, where yesterday’s reasons become today’s actions.

Why hourly granularity matters

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).

A worked example: the shift that came back

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.

Paper or pixels

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.

Where Fabrico fits

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.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who fills in the board?

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.

How is this different from an andon system?

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.

What should happen to the reasons?

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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