Skip ahead along the line

Operations and process improvement · Bicester and the M40/A41 belt

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A strip of brown paper pinned along a grey office wall, rows of blank lime, cream and amber sticky notes joined by pencil arrows, most of it softly out of focus.

Where does your floor knot?

The knot check

Eighteen questions about one working floor: where work waits, where it changes hands, where it is done again, where people search, and where things are handled twice.

Each answer ties, loops or straightens one stretch of a string, and the string becomes a map of where your floor knots, in your own answers. Print it, keep it, or attach it to a floor-walk request so the walk starts in the right place.

Start the questionsBook a floor walk

One floor, one ordinary shift

Eighteen questions, one tap each

Think of one floor and an ordinary shift, not the worst day of the year. Answer with what you have seen yourself. "Can't say yet" is a real answer, and a useful one.

Where work waits
1 Work stands in trolleys, totes, trays or inboxes between one step and the next.
2 A step stops because it is waiting for a person, a signature or a decision.
3 Goods-in, or the morning's inbox, builds up before anyone starts on it.
4 Finished work waits to be collected, despatched or passed on.
Hand-offs
5 Work changes hands without the next person knowing it is coming.
6 Details are retyped or rewritten when the work changes hands.
7 Someone has to chase a question back to the step before.
8 Once a job leaves a step, nobody is sure who owns it.
Rework
9 Work is checked a second time because the first check is not trusted.
10 Mistakes are found late: at packing, at despatch or by the customer.
11 A job is done again because the instruction was unclear or out of date.
Searching
12 People look for a location, a tool or a label before they can start.
13 People look for the one person who knows how a job is done.
14 Stock or files are not where the system or the plan says they are.
15 The current version of a form or an instruction is hard to find.
Double handling
16 Goods are put down and picked up again before they move on.
17 Items go to a holding area and are then moved a second time.
18 The same information is entered in two places.

The button draws the whole map on a page of its own, to print or to attach to a request. Nothing is kept by pressing it.

What the map is

Your own reading of the floor, drawn

The map is drawn from your answers and from nothing else. It is not a measurement, it carries no score, and it is not compared with anyone else's floor: there is no industry average behind it, because we do not have one and would not trust one.

What it is good for is deciding where a first walk starts. A stretch marked "most shifts" is where we would begin. A stretch marked "can't say yet" is worth walking early, because nobody has had to know. On the morning, the floor shows whether the answers hold.

  • Most shifts is drawn as a knot
  • Now and then is drawn as a loop
  • Not that I have seen is drawn as a straight run
  • Can't say yet is drawn as a gap in the string