Implementation Guide
Tier Meetings.
Tier meetings are the linked daily meetings that run a plant's daily management system: tier 1 at the team board, tier 2 for the area, tier 3 for the site, cascading within the same morning. A tier meeting is 15 minutes, standing, at the board, about deviations and actions. The moment it becomes a seated status meeting with slides, it stops protecting the day. Escalation is the product; without it the tiers are just three separate meetings.
What tier meetings are
A tier meeting is the daily rhythm of a plant's management system: a short, standing meeting at a visual board where a team compares yesterday to the standard, agrees what deviated, and assigns actions. The tiers link those meetings into a chain. Tier 1 runs at each team board, tier 2 gathers the tier 1 leaders for the area, tier 3 brings the areas to the plant manager, and the whole cascade fits inside the first two hours of the shift.
The chain matters more than any single meeting. What a team cannot solve moves up the same morning; what leadership decides moves back down the same day. That two-way traffic, escalation up, answers down, is the actual product of the system. A plant that runs three well-facilitated meetings with no escalation path between them does not have tier meetings. It has three separate meetings.
Scope note: this page covers the meeting cascade itself, agendas, timing and escalation rules. The board the meetings stand in front of has its own guide, SQDIP boards, and the surrounding operating system, boards plus meetings plus leader routines plus problem solving, is covered in lean daily management.
The three-tier structure at a glance
This is the standard shape for a mid-size plant on a 6:00 shift start. Shift the clock times with your own start time and keep the gaps: each tier needs 20 to 30 minutes after the one below it, so escalations arrive fresh and leaders can physically walk from board to board.
| Tier 1: team | Tier 2: area | Tier 3: site | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who attends | Team leader and the whole crew, 5 to 10 people | Area manager, the tier 1 leaders, plus maintenance, quality and planning reps | Plant manager, area managers, heads of engineering, HR and supply chain |
| When | 6:45, after the first 45 minutes of a 6:00 shift | 7:15 | 8:00 |
| Duration | 15 minutes | 20 minutes | 30 minutes |
| Board used | Team SQDIP board at the cell | Area board: one row per team, plus the escalation lane | Site board: SQDIP trends, top escalations, countermeasure status |
| Focus | Yesterday's deviations, today's risks, actions the team owns | Reds and escalations only, cross-functional support for today | Site trends, resource conflicts, decisions that need authority or money |
| What escalates up | Anything the team cannot fix with its own people and tools, raised within the hour | Anything needing capital, engineering time or a policy decision | Nothing. It ends here as a decision, a project or a documented no |
| What comes back down | An answer on the escalation lane by the next morning's meeting at the latest | An owner and a response time for every accepted escalation, the same day | Decisions and priorities, carried down through tier 2 the same day |
Durations are ceilings. A tier 1 that needs more than 15 minutes is solving problems in the meeting instead of assigning them after it.
Where tier meetings sit in the transformation roadmap
On the TeamGuru deployment roadmap tier meetings are the core of the daily management practice in the Run stage: they are how the SQDIP board becomes a management routine instead of wall decoration. They assume a KPI baseline already exists, run alongside standard work and 5S, and create the demand for what comes next: leader standard work to keep them honest, and structured problem solving to handle what they surface.
- Before Baseline KPIs
- You are here Daily Management
- In parallel Standard Work & 5S
- After Leader Standard Work
- After Structured Problem Solving
When you are not ready
Tier meetings are cheap to start and expensive to restart. A cascade launched before the prerequisites exist becomes a daily reminder that the system does not work, and the second launch fights that memory. Do not start when:
- There are no team boards yet. Tier meetings are a conversation about a board; without a working SQDIP board with yesterday's numbers on it, the meeting has nothing to stand in front of. Build the board first.
- There is no KPI baseline. If nobody can say what normal output, scrap or downtime looks like, every day is a deviation and none of them are. Baseline first, meetings second.
- Leaders cannot attend daily. If the area manager's calendar cannot protect 20 minutes every morning, fix the calendar before launching a cascade that dies the first week the leader travels.
- Yesterday's data arrives at noon. A 6:45 meeting about numbers that appear at 12:00 is a meeting about the day before yesterday. Fix the data flow to the board before you fix the meeting.
How to launch the cascade
Do not launch a plant-wide cascade on a Monday. Launch one meeting, make it good, and let each tier create the demand for the next. The sequence below takes a typical area from nothing to a working three-tier cascade in about eight weeks.
Weeks 1 to 2: one tier 1 in one area
Pick the cell with the most reliable SQDIP board and a leader willing to be first. Run the 15-minute meeting every working day. The area manager attends as a coach, not a chair: the team leader runs it. Expect the first week to be awkward and the second to be shorter.
Weeks 3 to 4: roll tier 1 across the area, add tier 2
Start the remaining team boards, seeding each new meeting with someone who saw the pilot. Once at least three tier 1 meetings produce escalations reliably, start the 7:15 area meeting. Tier 2 exists to answer tier 1; starting it earlier gives it nothing to do.
Weeks 5 to 8: extend to other areas, then add tier 3
Repeat the pattern area by area. Start the site meeting only when at least two areas run a stable tier 2. A tier 3 fed by one area is a status meeting with extra steps.
Design the clock backward from the site meeting
The rule is one morning: a deviation raised at 6:45 must be able to reach site level by 8:00 the same day. Leave 20 to 30 minutes between tiers so leaders can walk between boards. Shift the whole cascade with your shift start; keep the gaps.
Standardize the format everywhere
Same agenda, same board layout, same escalation lane in every area, so any leader can read any board in ten seconds and facilitation can rotate without retraining.
The timing design carries the whole point of the cascade: information raised at a team board at 6:45 is at site level by 8:00 the same morning, and the answer can be back at the team board before the shift ends. Any design where escalations wait for a weekly meeting has already lost the day it was supposed to protect.
Minute-by-minute agendas for tier 1 and tier 2
The agenda is the same every day, in the same order, so the meeting runs on rhythm rather than on the facilitator's energy. Print it and hang it next to the board. When a topic does not fit the agenda, it does not fit the meeting.
Tier 1: 15 minutes at the team board
| When | What happens |
|---|---|
| Min 0 to 2 | Safety and people: incidents, near misses, who is missing and how the line is covered today. |
| Min 2 to 7 | Board walk: yesterday's SQDIP actuals against target, each letter marked green or red by the team, not by the leader. |
| Min 7 to 12 | Deviations: for every red, what happened, what contains it today, and one action with an owner and a due date. No root cause hunting in the meeting. |
| Min 12 to 14 | Escalations: what the team cannot solve itself, written on the escalation lane in one sentence with the impact in units or minutes. |
| Min 14 to 15 | Today: the plan, the single biggest risk, and confirmation that yesterday's actions actually closed. |
Tier 2: 20 minutes at the area board
| When | What happens |
|---|---|
| Min 0 to 2 | Safety across the area: anything raised at any team board this morning, plus open safety actions. |
| Min 2 to 8 | Team by team, 60 to 90 seconds each, by exception: reds and escalations only. A green board gets a nod, not a recap. |
| Min 8 to 14 | New escalations: accept each one with an owner and a response time, or push back with a reason the team can hear. Nothing gets parked without a decision. |
| Min 14 to 18 | Coordination: today's maintenance, quality and materials priorities across teams, so support functions leave with one ranked list. |
| Min 18 to 20 | Open escalations from previous days: status of every item, and the answers each tier 1 leader carries back to their board. |
Notice what neither agenda contains: root cause analysis, project reviews, or general updates. The tier meeting decides what deviated and who acts. Everything that needs more than two minutes of discussion leaves the meeting with a name and a time attached.
Escalation rules and response times
Escalation fails in two opposite ways: everything moves up, and the tiers above drown, or nothing moves up, and teams quietly live with problems they cannot fix. The cure for both is the same: written rules that say what a team solves itself, what must move up, and how fast the answer comes back. The working rule of thumb: if the fix needs somebody who is not in the room, the item belongs one level up.
| Rule | What qualifies | The clock |
|---|---|---|
| The team solves it | The cause is known and the fix needs only the team's own people, tools and standards: a missing consumable, a first-time minor stop, 5S drift, a work instruction that needs a correction the team can make. | Action on the board the same day, owner named, closed within 24 hours. If it is still open after 24 hours, it stops being a team problem and moves up. |
| It moves up within the hour | The fix needs another function (maintenance, quality, planning, engineering), crosses team boundaries, involves any safety risk, is the third occurrence of the same deviation within two weeks, or has kept a KPI red for more than two days. | Written on the escalation lane during tier 1 and raised at the same morning's tier 2. Safety risks do not wait for a meeting: they go to the area manager immediately. |
| The answer comes back down | Every accepted escalation returns to the team board with one of three things: a fix, a dated plan, or a documented reason why not. Silence is not an option the system allows. | An interim answer by the end of the same shift, a final answer or a dated plan at the next morning's tier 1. No escalation lives more than 48 hours without a named owner and a date. |
One physical detail carries most of the discipline: the escalation lane. Every board, at every tier, has a visible strip where escalations live with three fields: what, raised when, answered when. An escalation that exists only in a notebook or an inbox has already failed, because nobody can see it aging.
Worked example: one deviation, one day
The numbers are illustrative but internally consistent, using the same 450-person components manufacturer that runs through the transformation roadmap: 456 units per day of demand, two shifts, 54,000 seconds of daily working time, a takt of 118 seconds. Day shift starts at 6:00; four production teams hold tier 1 at 6:45, the area meets at 7:15, the site at 8:00. Here is one deviation traveling through that cascade.
6:45, machining tier 1
The output row is red: 395 units against 456. The team traces it to three spindle-alarm stops on machine M-14 totaling 121 minutes; at a takt of 118 seconds that is 61 lost units. Operators reset the alarm each time but cannot diagnose it. It is the third day of the same alarm.
6:52
Escalation written on the lane: M-14 spindle alarm, third day, 121 minutes lost yesterday, need maintenance diagnostics today. Meeting ends at 7:00; the team goes back to the line.
7:15, area tier 2
The machining leader reports by exception in 70 seconds. The area manager accepts the escalation, names the maintenance planner as owner, and sets the response time: diagnosis by 10:00, answer on the board before the shift ends at 14:00.
8:00, site tier 3
M-14 appears on the site board as machining's top escalation. It needs no discussion: it has an owner and a clock. The plant manager asks one question: is a spare available if it turns out to be the spindle itself.
9:40
Diagnosis done. A worn drawbar spring is losing clamping force and triggering the alarm under load. A spare is in stock.
12:30
The spring is replaced during the planned break. Total intervention 40 minutes, no additional downtime.
13:40
The maintenance planner writes the answer on machining's escalation lane before the shift ends: cause found, part replaced, watch for recurrence this week.
Next morning, 6:45
No M-14 stops, output back on target, the row is green. Because resets hid a failing part for two days, tier 2 opens a 5 whys with the operator and the planner: why did the team keep resetting instead of escalating on day one?
Total meeting time spent on this problem across all three tiers: under four minutes. The cascade did not solve the spindle alarm; maintenance did. What the cascade added was speed and certainty: the problem reached someone who could act 30 minutes after it was named, carried a response time from the start, and the answer was back on the team's board before the shift ended, where everyone who raised it could see it.
Keeping tier meetings honest
Every tier meeting degrades without maintenance, and the degradation is always in the same direction: longer, more seated, more status, fewer actions. Three practices hold the standard:
- Leader standard work: the area manager attends one tier 1 per day as an observer, against a short checklist, and coaches the facilitator afterward, never during the meeting.
- A monthly meeting audit: a leader from a different area scores the meeting against the checklist below and reviews the result with the facilitator the same day.
- Rotating facilitation: the facilitator role rotates through the team every one to two weeks, so the meeting survives absences and promotions, and every member learns to run the board.
The six audit questions
- Did the meeting start on time, standing, at the board?
- Was it finished inside its timebox?
- Was yesterday's data on the board before the meeting started?
- Does every red have an action with an owner and a date?
- Was at least one item escalated or explicitly closed this week?
- Did every open escalation get a status, and every answered one reach the team?
The checks themselves belong in the leaders' daily routines, which is exactly what leader standard work formalizes: attendance, coaching and audits become scheduled, checkable work instead of good intentions.
Common failure modes
Tier meetings rarely fail loudly. They erode, and the erosion follows four predictable patterns. Each has a countermeasure that works better as a standing rule than as a one-time correction.
Slides creep in
Someone builds a deck to save time, and within a month the meeting is seated, projected and twice as long. The countermeasure is a rule, not a reminder: the board is the only medium. If it is not on the board, it is not in the meeting.
The 45-minute tier 2
Problem solving has moved into the meeting. The meeting identifies, assigns and checks; solving happens afterward with only the people who are needed. Give the facilitator explicit license to say take it offline, and put a visible clock next to the board.
Escalations disappear into notebooks
A supervisor writes the issue in a pad and the pad goes to the office. An escalation exists only on the lane, with the date raised and the date answered both visible. Anything older than 48 hours without an owner goes on the next tier 2 agenda automatically.
Attendance decay after month two
Leaders start sending delegates, then apologies. Attendance is leader standard work and gets checked like any other standard. But treat decay as a symptom: people stop coming when escalations stop coming back answered. Audit the answer rate before you audit the attendance.
What happens next
A working cascade surfaces more problems than it can fix with same-day actions, and that is by design. Deviations that repeat, the same alarm, the same defect, the same shortage, exit the meeting into structured problem solving: a 5 whys for the simple ones, a full root cause and corrective action cycle for the ones that keep coming back. The tier meeting remains the place where those countermeasures report progress, which closes the loop between daily management and improvement.
The hard part of sustaining all this is not discipline, it is bookkeeping: hundreds of small escalations, actions and answers per month, each needing an owner, a date and a visible status. This is where TeamGuru fits the practice: the meeting management, KPI management and problem escalation use cases keep the KPI, the discussion, the action, the owner and the escalation in one thread, so an item raised at tier 1 carries its history with it to tier 2 and the answer comes back down the same path, visible to the team that raised it.
On the roadmap, the next practices are leader standard work, which makes attending, coaching and auditing the cascade part of every leader's checked daily routine, and structured problem solving, which turns what the cascade surfaces into root causes actually removed.
