📋 Lean Architect · Tyshchenko Lean Academy

SQDC Board

Visual management of an area: deviations visible in seconds

Packing area · Week 14
Click any cell to see what’s behind it. A red cell isn’t a report on a bad day — it’s a PDCA trigger: it has to end with an entry in the action plan.
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Action Plan

Every deviation that has an owner assigned ends up here. A board without this column turns into a scoreboard — it looks nice, but it changes nothing.

What this tool is

The SQDC board is a basic building block of Shop Floor Management. It’s also called a visual management board or a huddle board. Four rows of metrics, the days of the week across, two colors.

Mieruka (見える化) — visual control. The principle that any deviation from standard becomes visible instantly. Color coding lets you read the state of an area in a few seconds, without digging into analytics.
SQDC discipline — the order matters

The metrics follow a fixed Lean priority. It isn’t alphabetical and it isn’t for convenience — it protects against swapping one goal for another.

S
SafetyAlways comes first. No metric below it justifies a risk to a person.
Q
QualityProduct that has to be reworked doesn’t count toward the plan.
D
DeliveryPlan and deadlines. Only after safety and quality are on target.
C
CostProductivity and unit cost — last in line, not first.
The order prevents the classic trap: productivity grows at the expense of quality or safety. On an SQDC board that kind of growth shows up immediately as red at the top and green at the bottom.
Four functions in the system
1
Driver of daily Gemba meetingsThe board is the focal point of short stand-up meetings right on the shop floor. It structures the conversation around facts and deviations, not opinions.
2
Trigger for PDCAA red cell automatically starts a root cause analysis: 5 Whys or an Ishikawa (fishbone) diagram, then a task in the action plan. Without that, the board only records the problem.
3
Finding bottlenecksRepeated shortfalls in one area highlight a system constraint. One red cell is an incident. Four in a row is a constraint.
4
The base of a board cascadeArea → department → plant. A single format lets a manager read someone else’s area without explanations.
Daily huddle at the board · 10–15 minutes

The format is strict on purpose. Once a huddle turns into a discussion, it stretches to an hour and stops happening every day.

1
Standing, at the board, in the areaNot in a meeting room and not with slides. A standing meeting limits its own length.
2
Read only the redGreen cells get no comments. If everything is green, the huddle takes two minutes — and that’s fine.
3
SQDC order, no exceptionsSafety first, even when the plan is on fire. The order is what makes the board a system rather than a scoreboard.
4
Every deviation is an entry in the planWhat we do, who owns it, by what date. Without these three fields the item doesn’t count.
5
What can’t be solved here gets escalatedA problem beyond the team’s authority goes to the department board the same day, not a week later.
Three mistakes that kill a board
The supervisor fills in the board the evening before.
Then it’s reporting for management, not a team tool. The board has to be filled in with the team, in front of the team.
Red is treated as punishment.
If people are punished for a red cell, red cells stop appearing. The board turns green and the problems become invisible.
Nobody reviews the action plan.
Items pile up without being closed. The rule is simple: the huddle starts by checking yesterday’s items, not with new metrics.