Implementation Guide
SQDIP Boards.
SQDIP is a daily performance board that tracks Safety, Quality, Delivery, Inventory and Productivity for one area, one day at a time, on binary red or green rules. It is a conversation structure, not a wall decoration: each letter forces a daily answer to one question, are we winning today, and if not, who is doing what about it. A board that never turns red is lying.
What SQDIP is, letter by letter
SQDIP is five letters on a board in the work area: Safety, Quality, Delivery, Inventory, Productivity. Each letter carries a grid of one square per day of the month, and every day the team colors each square red or green against a rule agreed in advance. Below the letters sits an action strip: what went red, what is being done about it, who owns it, and by when.
The board is a conversation structure, not a wall decoration. The letters exist to force a daily answer to one question per dimension: are we winning today, and if not, who is doing what about it. The colors are not the point. The ten minutes the team spends in front of them every morning is the point, and the board only exists so that conversation has facts to stand on.
Which is why a board that never turns red is lying. Either the rules are so soft they cannot fail, or the marks are averages that smooth the misses away, or people have learned that a red square buys them an interrogation. Red is not the failure. Red is the product: each one is a problem caught the day it happened, small enough to still be cheap.
| Letter | What tier 1 tracks | Example metric | Example red rule |
|---|---|---|---|
| S Safety | Injuries, near misses, first aid cases, unsafe conditions found and fixed. The daily question: did everyone go home whole, and will they today? | Recordables plus near misses per shift | Red if any recordable or any near miss on the shift |
| Q Quality | Defects made or caught in the area, first pass yield, anything that escaped to the next process or the customer. The daily question: did we make it right the first time? | First pass yield (FPY) | Red if FPY below 97 percent for the shift |
| D Delivery | Output against the shift plan, schedule attainment, late orders caused by the area. The daily question: did the next process or customer get what was promised? | Units completed vs shift plan | Red if the shift closes below plan, even by one unit |
| I Inventory | Work in process against designed buffer bands, kanban discipline, material shortages. The daily question: is material where the design says it should be? | WIP ahead of the area, in pieces | Red if any buffer sits above max or below min at the shift-start count |
| P Productivity | Output per labor hour, downtime, takt attainment. The daily question: did the staffing we paid for produce the output it was planned for? | Units per labor hour | Red if below 95 percent of standard for the shift |
Notice what every example rule has in common: it is binary, and it is shift-level. One threshold, crossed or not, judged on what this crew could influence before the shift ended. No yellow, because yellow is where misses go to hide. No month-to-date percentages, because an average lets you lose today while the board stays green.
Where SQDIP sits in the transformation roadmap
On the TeamGuru deployment roadmap, SQDIP boards are the visual core of the daily management practice in the Run Daily stage. They come after a trusted KPI baseline exists, run alongside standard work and 5S, and feed the problems they surface into structured problem solving. This page covers the board itself. The system around it is covered in lean daily management, and the meeting cascade the board reports into is covered in tier meetings.
- Before Baseline KPIs
- You are here SQDIP Boards
- In parallel Standard Work & 5S
- After Structured Problem Solving
When a board is premature
An SQDIP board multiplies a management system that already exists in embryo. It cannot substitute for one. Hold off when any of these is true:
- There is no trusted baseline. If the area cannot yet say what first pass yield or schedule attainment actually is, red rules become guesses and the first argument at the board is about the data, not the problem. Build the measurement first; see the manufacturing KPIs guide below.
- There is no meeting rhythm to act on it. A board without a daily meeting is a chart. If supervisors cannot protect ten minutes a day, fix that calendar problem before buying whiteboards.
- Nobody above the area answers escalations. If a red that the team cannot solve has nowhere to go, the board teaches helplessness with color coding.
- The area is in an acute crisis. A line-down week or a customer quality stop needs containment, not a new routine. Start the board when the firefighting stops long enough to breathe.
The first condition is the most common. If the plant is still deciding what to measure and how, start with the manufacturing KPIs guide and return here once the numbers survive an argument.
The board layout
The layout that works is boring and repeatable: five panels in a row, one per letter. Each panel carries the letter, the metric and its red rule printed where everyone can read them, and a day-by-month grid, 31 squares colored as the month advances. Along the bottom runs the action strip: one row per red, with the fact, the action, the owner, the due date and the status. Some plants draw the big letter itself divided into 31 segments; it photographs well, but a plain grid is easier to mark and easier to audit.
Assembly area board, day 17 of the month
Recordables + near misses
First pass yield
Units vs plan
WIP vs band
Units per labor hour
Action strip
| Day | Letter | Fact | Action | Owner | Due | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12th | Q | FPY 96.1 percent, bent connector pins | Escalated to tier 2, 8D opened | K. Malik | 20th | Open |
| 16th | D | 214 of 228 units, feeder jams on line 2 | Replace worn feeder rail | M. Ortiz | 19th | In progress |
| 17th | P | 2.3 units per labor hour, two unfilled positions | Cross-train two operators from subassembly | J. Rivera | 24th | Open |
Illustrative board, mid-month. Every red square in the grids should be traceable to a row in the action strip, and every row to a red square.
Everything else is optional. A run chart or Pareto behind each panel helps once the team is doing weekly problem solving; photographs, mission statements and laminated policies do not. The test for anything added to the board: does the ten-minute meeting use it? If not, it is decoration displacing information.
How to stand up a board, area by area
A board takes an afternoon to build and four to six weeks to make real. The sequence below is one area's path; run it to a stable rhythm before starting the next area.
- Pick one pilot area, not the whole plant. Choose the area with the strongest supervisor, not the worst numbers. The pilot's job is to produce a working example the next areas can copy, and a struggling area cannot carry a new routine and its old problems at once.
- Choose metrics the people on shift can influence. One metric per letter, and each must pass one test: if the team does everything right today, does the letter go green tonight? Plant OEE, monthly scrap cost and customer PPM fail that test at tier 1. Units against plan, first pass yield at the line and pieces in the buffer pass it.
- Set the red or green rule as binary and shift-level. One threshold, one shift, no yellow, no month-to-date averages. Yellow is where misses go to hide, and an average is a way to be losing today while the board says otherwise. Anyone in the area should be able to audit yesterday's color in under a minute.
- Build the board and agree who marks it, and when. The outgoing team marks the grid at shift handover as part of its standard work, with the supervisor confirming, not substituting. A board colored in by the supervisor alone at 4 pm is a report, and reports do not change the next shift.
- Train the 10 minutes, daily, for two weeks. Run the meeting every working day with a coach standing in the circle: same time, same order, agenda on the board. The supervisor leads from day one. The area manager attends to model behavior, especially the hard part, thanking people for reds.
- Connect escalation before you scale. Agree what the area may decide alone, what goes up to the tier 2 meeting, and how fast the answer comes back. Then replicate area by area, one at a time, each choosing its own five metrics. Copying the pilot's metrics onto every board is how SQDIP becomes wallpaper.
The 10-minute board meeting
Standing, at the board, same time every day, supervisor leading, everyone who ran the shift invited. Ten minutes is enough because the meeting decides and assigns; it does not solve. The minute marks are a discipline, not a stopwatch exercise: they exist so safety is never skipped and actions are never squeezed out.
| Minute | Block | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| 0:00 to 1:00 | Safety first | Any incident, near miss or unsafe condition in the last 24 hours, plus today's specific risk: a new operator, contractor work, a machine opened for maintenance. Safety opens every meeting, even when the whole month is green. |
| 1:00 to 3:00 | Yesterday's letters | Walk S, Q, D, I, P in order. Green letters get one word. Each red gets the fact in one sentence: what, where, how big. No root cause hunting at the board. |
| 3:00 to 5:00 | Yesterday's misses become actions | Every red gets an action with an owner and a date on the action strip, or an update to the action it already has. A red with no action is the meeting's failure, not the shift's. |
| 5:00 to 7:00 | Today's risks | What could turn a letter red today: a staffing gap, a material shortage, a machine flagged by maintenance, a trial run. Assign countermeasures now, not at 2 pm when the plan is already lost. |
| 7:00 to 9:00 | Actions and escalations | Run the action strip: due today, overdue, blocked. Anything the area cannot solve with its own people and budget is named for escalation to tier 2, together with the person who will carry it there. |
| 9:00 to 10:00 | Close | Repeat who owes what by when. End on time. The meeting's punctuality is the board's credibility. |
The one rule that keeps all six blocks working: no problem solving at the board. The moment two people start debating root causes, the other six mentally leave. The facilitator's line is simple: good problem, wrong meeting, who takes it and when.
Worked example: five metrics, five red rules
The numbers are illustrative but internally consistent, for the 450-person components manufacturer used across the transformation roadmap: 456 units per day of demand, two shifts, 54,000 seconds of daily working time, takt of 118 seconds. Its final assembly area runs 12 operators per shift and owes 228 units per shift. The area team chose these five metrics and rules:
| Letter | Metric | Green means | Red rule |
|---|---|---|---|
| S | Recordables and near misses | Zero recordables, zero near misses | Red if any recordable or any near miss on the shift |
| Q | First pass yield at end-of-line test | 97 percent or better (at most 6 defects in 228 units) | Red at 7 or more defects on a 228-unit shift |
| D | Units completed vs shift plan | 228 units, the full shift plan | Red if the shift closes below 228, even at 227 |
| I | WIP ahead of the cell at shift start | 450 to 900 pieces, one to two days of demand | Red if the count is above 900 or below 450 pieces |
| P | Units per labor hour (12 operators, 90 labor hours) | 2.5 units per labor hour or better | Red below 2.4, roughly 95 percent of standard |
Three of these rules deserve a word. Delivery is deliberately unforgiving: 227 units is red, because "close enough" is how a plan erodes one unit at a time. The inventory band, 450 to 900 pieces, is not arbitrary; it is the supermarket designed in the plant's value stream map, so the board now guards a design decision instead of an opinion. And safety counts a reported near miss as red on purpose: red means "we talk about this today", not "someone is in trouble". The supervisor thanks the reporter by name, out loud, every time, because the day near misses stop being reported is the day the S row starts lying.
In the first two weeks the board ran mostly red: delivery missed six days of ten, productivity swung with unfilled positions, and quality went red three days running on the same bent-pin defect. That streak is what a working board looks like. The bent-pin red escalated to tier 2, came back as an 8D with the connector supplier, and the D row improved two weeks later for a reason everyone at the board could name.
SQDCP, SQCDP and other variants
Every plant eventually has the letters debate. The common variants:
| Variant | What changes | When it makes sense |
|---|---|---|
| SQDC / SQDCP | C for Cost, either replacing Inventory and Productivity or added as a fifth letter | When finance insists on a cost letter. Be honest about it: shift teams rarely move cost directly, so give C a driver the shift controls, such as scrap pieces or overtime hours, not a currency figure computed elsewhere. |
| SQCDP | Same letters, quality placed before delivery | A statement of priority order. Harmless, and occasionally useful in plants recovering from a habit of shipping defects to protect the schedule. |
| +E (environment) | An E panel for spills, emissions and environmental permit conditions | Process industries where an environmental event is as serious as a safety event. Elsewhere it usually dilutes attention. |
| +M (morale or people) | Attendance, skill coverage, open positions | Useful where absenteeism is the daily constraint on the plan. Keep the rule binary: red if the shift started below its minimum crew or skill coverage. |
The opinionated advice: argue less about letters, more about red rules. Any letter set works if every letter has a binary shift-level rule, a daily mark made by the team, and an action strip that gets run. No letter set works without those. A site that spends three weeks debating whether inventory deserves a panel is usually avoiding the harder conversation about what red should mean.
Running it day to day
The marks are made at shift handover by the outgoing team, against the rules, in under five minutes, as written standard work. The meeting runs at the start of the incoming shift. That timing matters: the board describes yesterday while there is still a today to protect.
Every red follows the same path. It becomes a fact in one sentence, then an action with an owner and a date on the strip. A red the area can fix stays at tier 1. A red the area cannot fix with its own people and budget, or a letter red three days running, or the same cause repeating within a week, goes up to the tier 2 meeting the same morning, carried by a named person, with an agreed time for the answer to come back. That cascade is the subject of the tier meetings guide, and the escalation mechanics are the problem escalation use case. Chronic reds, the ones that survive quick fixes, leave the board and enter structured problem solving with a page of daily marks as their evidence.
Leaders keep the system honest by showing up. A plant manager who visits two boards a week as part of leader standard work and asks "what did this red produce?" teaches more about standards than any policy. A leader who walks past a wall of green without asking how a struggling area manages to be green teaches something too.
What good and bad look like
What bad looks like
- Colored in at 4 pm by the supervisor, alone, from memory
- Month-to-date averages and percentages instead of daily marks
- No action strip, or actions with no owners and no dates
- Six straight weeks of green in an area everyone knows is struggling
- Metrics the shift cannot move: plant OEE, monthly scrap cost, customer PPM
- The meeting drifts to 25 minutes of root cause debate at the board
What good looks like
- Marked by the team at handover, red the same day the rule is broken
- Binary shift-level rules anyone in the area can audit in a minute
- Every red square traceable to an action with an owner and a date
- Repeated reds escalate, and the answer comes back within a day
- Leaders ask questions at the board instead of requesting reports
- Ten minutes, standing, same time every day, ends on time
Making it digital without killing it
Start physical. The habit, marking a square with your own hand, standing in a circle, pointing at a red, is easier to build around a wall than a screen. But a whiteboard has real limits at scale: history ends at 31 days when the grid is wiped, action strips fill up and get erased, and an escalated red has to be retyped into whatever tier 2 uses.
Going digital fixes exactly those things when it is done as a board, not as a dashboard. In TeamGuru, the letters live as KPIs with their red rules attached, the ten-minute meeting keeps its standing agenda in meeting management, and a red becomes an owned, dated action in the same motion, visible to the tier 2 meeting without anyone copying anything. Twelve months of daily marks become the Pareto that problem solving needs, which a wiped whiteboard can never give you.
What must survive digitization, non-negotiably: the standing daily meeting at a screen or board in the area, a human confirming the day's colors rather than an algorithm assigning them unwatched, and binary red rules that nobody smooths into indexes. The tool should remove the retyping, not the ritual. A dashboard nobody stands in front of is the old lying wall, now with a login.
