Reading a manufacturing shop in one day: the operator's walking checklist

A trained operator can walk a manufacturing facility in one working day and read eighty percent of what matters about the operation's actual health. The walk is structured around four lenses: physical posture (what the facility looks like and how the workflow moves), production posture (what the equipment is actually doing relative to its design capability), people posture (what the operators tell you with their bodies and what they tell you with their words), and records posture (what the operating rhythm produces in paper or electrons). Most of the read comes from the physical walk. The records get sampled, not exhaustively reviewed, to validate or challenge what the physical observation suggested.