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Assess your WCM pillars. See what to strengthen next.

An order, not a score.

This free World Class Manufacturing self-assessment rates 23 observable practices across daily management, the ten technical pillars and the managerial side. Most assessments end with a percentage. This one tells you which area to strengthen first, because the most expensive mistake in WCM is launching every pillar at once. The reasoning is in our guide to World Class Manufacturing.

You answer every statement on one scale: how far has the practice spread?

  1. 0

    Not in place

  2. 1

    Started

    On paper or tried once, not yet routine

  3. 2

    Model area

    Routine in one area, results visible there

  4. 3

    Expanding

    Routine in most areas, results measured

  5. 4

    Standard

    Plant-wide, sustained over time, and the standard itself is being improved

13 areas, built in five stages

Pillars have prerequisites. Your result points at the earliest stage that still has a gap. Daily management overrides the order: without it, no pillar holds its gains.

  1. Stage 1 Diagnose
    • Cost deployment
  2. Stage 2 Build the frame
    • Logistics and customer service
    • Objectives and route map
  3. Stage 3 Run daily
    • Daily management Comes first, always
    • Safety and health
    • Autonomous maintenance and workplace organization
    • Quality control
  4. Stage 4 Improve
    • Focused improvement
    • Professional maintenance
    • Early equipment management
  5. Stage 5 Scale
    • People development
    • Environment and energy
    • Leadership and engagement

All 23 statements

Read them before you start, or print them for the team. Each describes something you could walk out and check on the shop floor today.

Daily management
  • Safety, quality, delivery and cost KPIs are available per line by the start of the next shift, through a reliable standard process.
  • Short daily meetings at each level (line, area, plant) review yesterday's KPIs and today's problems on a fixed schedule.
  • A problem a team cannot solve reaches the next level within 24 hours, with an owner and a date.
  • Every action from meetings, audits and problem solving is tracked in one shared system, with an owner, a due date and visible status.
Cost deployment
  • Losses are quantified in money, and the loss–cost analysis decides which projects get launched.
  • Each improvement project has an expected saving and a verified one.
Safety and health
  • Near misses and unsafe conditions are reported, and each one gets a countermeasure with an owner.
Focused improvement
  • Teams use a problem-solving method appropriate to the size and complexity of the loss.
  • A solution that works is rolled out to similar lines and machines (yokoten).
Autonomous maintenance and workplace organization
  • Operators clean, inspect and lubricate to standards they helped write; abnormalities are tagged and closed.
  • Workplace organization (5S) is audited regularly, and the scores lead to actions.
Professional maintenance
  • Breakdowns are analyzed to root cause, and MTBF and MTTR are tracked per critical machine.
  • Most maintenance work is planned (preventive or condition-based), and the share of planned work is known.
Quality control
  • Quality problems and customer complaints are worked through a structured root-cause process, and fixes are verified before closure.
Logistics and customer service
  • Material flows by pull or a levelled plan; inventory and lead time are measured per value stream.
Early equipment management
  • Lessons from current equipment feed into new designs, and new equipment reaches target performance within a planned start-up period.
People development
  • A skills matrix shows, for each workstation, what it requires and who is qualified.
  • Training is planned from the gaps in the matrix, and its effect is checked on the job.
Environment and energy
  • Energy and resource use is measured at the relevant process, line or equipment level and treated as a loss.
Objectives and route map
  • A few breakthrough objectives are deployed to every level, with targets the teams helped set.
  • A multi-year route map says which pillar, in which area, at which step, by when.
Leadership and engagement
  • Plant management leads WCM visibly: regular time on the floor and personal reviews of pillar progress.
  • Operators propose and carry out improvements, and participation is measured.

Questions about the assessment.

Is this an official WCM audit?
No. It is a self-assessment written in our own words. It does not use the official audit criteria, and its result does not correspond to bronze, silver or gold. Use it to decide what to work on, not to predict an audit score.
Why is there no overall score?
Because a single number hides the thing that matters. A plant with strong improvement pillars and weak daily management will lose its gains, and an average would call it halfway there. The result shows the profile and names the next step instead.
How is the next step chosen?
Daily management comes first: if it scores under half, that is the recommendation, whatever the pillars score. Otherwise the assessment walks the five-stage roadmap from our WCM guide and picks the earliest stage that still has an area under half.
Who should fill it in?
A WCM coordinator or plant manager can do it alone in about seven minutes. It is more useful when two or three people fill it in separately and compare: the statements where the answers differ are worth a conversation.
What happens to my answers?
They stay in your browser. The report link carries the answers in the address itself, so you can send it to a colleague. Nothing is stored on our side and no email is asked for.

Want to talk through your result?

Get a demo and see how strategy, KPIs, daily management, audits and problem solving connect in one system.