Explainer
The real decision cadence of a plant — daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly
Most plant decisions are not made in a system. They are made in a meeting, from a spreadsheet someone rebuilt the night before.
9 min read
Every plant runs four clocks at once
Daily: the morning production meeting. What ran, what stopped, what is short, who is chasing what. The inputs are a shift log, a downtime sheet, a shortage list from procurement and whatever the supervisor remembers.
Weekly: the schedule review and the order-promise conversation. Which Flows slipped, which customers get called, which line gets the overtime. This is where the advanced spreadsheet model comes out — the one with twelve tabs that one planner owns.
Monthly: performance review. OEE, scrap, on-time delivery, spend against plan. Half the meeting is spent agreeing which version of each number is correct.
Quarterly: capital, capacity and vendor decisions. The stakes are highest, the data is oldest, and the argument is usually settled by whoever has the most operating experience in the room.
The pattern: the shorter the cycle, the worse the data
Quarterly decisions get an analyst and three weeks of preparation. Daily decisions get a person with a coffee and a printed sheet. Yet daily decisions consume most of the plant's margin, because they determine overtime, expedite freight, changeover sequence and unplanned downtime response.
Data investment usually runs in exactly the opposite direction — dashboards get built for the quarterly board pack, not for the 6:30am stand-up.
Firefighting is a data symptom, not a discipline problem
When a meeting spends its first twenty minutes reconciling numbers, the decision that follows is made on the remaining ten. Teams are not undisciplined — they are working without a shared, current, traceable picture, so the only reliable input left is experience.
Experience is valuable and should be kept. The problem is that it is unwritten, unavailable at 2am, and it leaves the building when the person retires.
What to fix first
Take the single meeting that recurs most often and costs the most attendee-hours. Identify every number reviewed in it and where each one comes from. Most plants find three to six sources, two of which are spreadsheets and one of which nobody can fully explain.
Automate that meeting's data pack first — same definitions, same refresh, same place, before the meeting starts. You will not remove the meeting. You will change what it is for: from reconciling to deciding.
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