Shop-Floor Data That Supervisors Actually Use

What to capture on the floor, what to skip, and how to keep data collection from becoming a second job.

The failure mode of shop-floor data collection is over-collection. Every field added is a field someone has to complete, and the marginal value of the tenth field is usually negative.

Start with four things: what job is running, at what operation, how much good product was produced, and how much was scrapped or reworked. Those four answer most supervisor questions and feed job costing.

Labor detail, downtime reason codes and machine data are worth adding when there is a specific decision waiting on them — not as a general principle.