7 parts. Read top to bottom.
The first post in a series on moving more work through a shop — from one station, to the office, to the shops you trade with. It starts with a roll of tape and three numbers, and most of what it finds doesn't need a line of code.
One customer PO, keyed into the quote, keyed again onto the traveler, keyed a third time into the books. A small tool that reads it once and drafts the work order for a human to approve — and why a patch this small has an outsized effect on the whole shop.
Lights-out gets sold as a machine problem. Often the reason a shop can't run an unattended shift isn't the machine — it's that nothing can tell the machine what to do next without a person in the office. Here is the list of handoffs that have to happen without a human, and where that list stops at your wall.
Most shops already have a system of record on the floor — the paper traveler, with its stamps and initials and the job number in Sharpie. Making it digital is not a big floor-software project. It's three questions, one scan, and a screen the floor actually looks at.
Every rung of this series ends with "and here's the number." This post is about the number — how a sprint's KPI gets picked in discovery, written on the quote, measured with the same instrument before and after, and what happens when it misses. Including what we do with an RFP.
Most shops should climb the ladder one rung at a time. Sometimes the floor underneath is failing. What a full rebuild actually looks like from the inside — the data archaeology, the replay of 268,861 historical builds, and a go-live that has to be earned — told from one in progress.
Every rung of this ladder stops at your wall. The plater, the heat treater, the shop that takes your overflow — the job still leaves as an email, a PDF, and a phone call. The Secure Job Envelope is our answer — an open file format for a job, with the honest list of what it does and doesn't do yet.