The First Hour of Every Shift Is Won the Night Before
Why does your best operator start the shift playing detective? Nobody told them what actually happened on the last one. So they spend the first hour hunting. What ran short. Which machine acted up. Why there's a pallet sitting on hold. That's an hour of your day gone before a single good part gets made.
The Problem
Most handoffs happen in a hallway. Two words and a wave. "You're good, nothing major." Then the incoming lead inherits a mystery. The open issue from second shift never got written down, so it gets rediscovered at 2 a.m. The quality hold nobody flagged ships anyway.
Small gaps, every shift, every day. They add up to rework, missed plans and a team that feels like it's always starting from behind.
The Shift
The best plants hand off momentum. The outgoing team leaves the incoming team informed, so nobody starts the shift guessing. It takes one page, filled out the same way every time, so nothing important walks out the door with the last crew.
Hand the next crew a running start.
Tool Drop: The Pass-Down
A one-page shift handoff your leads fill out in the last ten minutes and hand to the next crew. Six zones, same order every time:
Safety. Anything that hurt someone, almost did, or still could.
Quality holds. What's on hold, why, and who owns it.
Plan vs. actual. What we said we'd make and what we made.
Open issues. Machines, materials and problems still in play.
People and coverage. Who's out, who's covering, and where the gaps are.
The one thing. The single thing the next crew has to know.
Print it. Clip it to a board at the handoff point. Fill it in pen. The whole thing takes under ten minutes.
Download the free PDF or see every free tool.
The Cheat Code
A shift that starts informed never has to start over.
Want this running on every shift without another spreadsheet to babysit? The Leadership Operation System puts these tools on every leader's phone and shows you, on one page, who is using them.
Golden Nugget
You hand off more than a shift. You hand off momentum.
Warmly,
Dave
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