Daily Management Worksheet

The Daily Management Worksheet is a tool to help you update your production board. It has tabs for planning your demand and staffing. This information is automatically added to the production board worksheet to help you manage your day.

The production board is the cornerstone of daily management. It is a very visual indicator of a team’s progress, and makes sure that everyone has the same understanding of the current condition of the team.

Note that you will likely need to make modifications to this tool to match your staff size, types of work, start times, etc.

On this worksheet, the light gray blocks are filled out on a daily basis. The dark gray blocks are updated less frequently.

Using the Daily Management Worksheet

1. Fill out the hour-by-hour demand patterns of your products on the ‘Demand’ tab.
2. Enter the relative weights of the type of work your team does. Use task “A” as the base task and set it to “1”. For example, if task “B” takes one and a half times as long as task “A”, it would be weighted 1.5.
3. On the “Staffing” tab, enter the current productivity (items per hour).
4. Enter the schedule of your staff on the “Staffing” tab. Adjust for lunches, stand-up meetings, cleanup time, etc.
5. Enter the skill level of the person, with “1” meaning the person produces at exactly the planning rate. Caution: This can be a sensitive issue. You may choose to use it only for trainees.
6. If a person is absent for the day, enter a “0” next to the “<-Absent” label.
7. Enter adjustments in the “Out”/“Extra” boxes. The formulas subtract hours from the “Out” column and add to the “Extra” column, so there is no need to include minus signs.
8. On the “Production Board” tab, you will see the results of the Demand and Staffing data you entered in the Plan column.
9. Set the “End of Day Target” for your queue. Depending on your specific customer requirements and the way your work flows, you may not want to work down to 0 every day. The most likely reason is to prevent starving the team of work the next morning.
10. Enter the size of the queue at the start of the workday. It will be equivalent to the previous end-of-day backlog plus the overnight demand.
11. Enter any specific adjustments to demand. This would include known one-time variations in demand, such as if a customer calls to tell you to expect several additional orders.
12. Changes to staffing should be done on the staffing tab. Other capacity changes, such as system downtime or additional help from another team should be entered on the capacity adjustment column.
13. As the day progresses, enter the actual incoming work and output in the appropriate columns at the specified times.
14. Any discrepancies to plan should be noted in the “Notes” column and recorded for future problem-solving efforts.
15. Transfer the information to the production board posted in your work area.
16. At each checkpoint, enter the current data and revise the plan to keep on target. This task becomes much easier with a playbook to specify the actions to take in given situations.

Setting up a basic production board takes relatively little effort. It is much harder, though, to actually take the actions to keep a team on track. You will need to have team members cross-trained to assist each other, schedules adjusted to match demand, standardization of processes to ensure consistency, and a whole lot more. Daily management, though, provides the framework for you to put all those pieces together.