Manufacturing operations are often 24x7, and so is the rotation of teams and leaders. It makes maintaining consistency a constant challenge. Adopting a digital approach to shift handovers is essential to ensure a continuous flow of information between all employees — it will boost operational stability and informed decision-making at every level.
Shift reports: The running information thread between one shift and the next
There is no need to wait for the end of a shift. Ideally, workers start creating their shift report the moment they begin working. As the shift progresses, they can add noteworthy items as they occur. Photos or videos, with brief text recorded in the moment, make things clearer and more accurate without relying on memory after eight or more hours on the factory floor.
Digital shift reports, when compared to paper or meetings, provide company-wide benefits. Dynamically communicated information arms employees with essential knowledge that helps guide teams effectively throughout the remainder of the shift, leading to optimized operations, increased safety and better outcomes. To achieve this, it is vital to exchange all correct and relevant information during the digital shift report. The necessary information will be different for each facility, but the need to communicate this information clearly and dynamically is ever-present. This is where connected worker solutions step in.
Detail matters: The key information included in a shift report
The exact contents vary per factory, however, a shift report typically covers all or some of the following elements: General information on the shift with highlights and/or lowlights explained; SHE (safety, health and environment) information such as any issues encountered or observed; KPIs, such as OEE, throughput, yield or other factory specific measures; Equipment changes such as settings concerning speed, centrelines etc; Issues or problems encountered during the shift, what actions were taken, and who was assigned responsibility to take corrective action.
From safety to quality: The real value behind detailed shift reports
To have a genuine and effective impact, it is important to focus on the areas and key KPIs that matter the most — employee safety, efficiency and quality.
Shift reports can drastically improve safety in the workplace. A good shift report will give granular detail for the incoming team to ensure they are fully informed about safety observations from a previous shift, potential hazards and accidents to prevent any further incidents from occurring. Safety is improved as specific KPIs are monitored to ensure the workplace is safe for operation. For example, it will log the number of near misses, incidents, accidents, time lost and track safety compliance.
When it comes to efficiency on the manufacturing shop floor, shift reports help increase engagement and team building by connecting operators across shifts. This enhanced knowledge helps to improve cross-shift relationships and provide performance leveling across shifts. Optimized OEE and better production continuity monitors paper waste, while digital forms reduce duplication of efforts and ensure faster issue responses, enabling companies to improve efficiency and reduce downtime.
In the manufacturing industry, ensuring consistent quality is always critical. However, incomplete or inaccurate handovers can result in losses tied to quality issues. For example, the incoming team may not be aware of raw material issues or important equipment adjustments, leading to potential defects or variations in the final output. Poor product quality can lead to customer complaints, returns and company reputation damage — therefore it is where improved quality and efficiency metrics across the factory floor, such as First Pass Yield (FPY), material waste, defects/rejects and cost of quality can help manufacturers keep quality high.
Continuous learning and development
Digital shift reports have a critical role. By integrating them with an advanced connected worker solution, manufacturers can reap benefits that go even further, including conditional logic and other mechanisms to shorten completion, knowledge management and factory feed. Multi-media work instructions on the shift handover process allow workers to access the instruction when needed and remind themselves about the key details and information required in the report. With factory-wide communication features such as Factory Feed, manufacturers can post links to the shift report and solicit feedback from the team on lessons learned, issues identified and other important plant matters. Employees themselves also have access to historical and archived data and analytics.
In turn, these reports play a central role in enabling better skills management. Companies can make use of specialized shift handover training, complete with exams and assessments, that can be used to track the knowledge and competency of your team and enhance the shift handover process. This training will unlock new employee competencies and skills in a more organic, efficient and effective way. Given that a massive 90% of learning and development comes from experiential and social learning, a connected worker app to facilitate training means that each employee can be consistently trained in role-specific skills on a shift-by-shift basis.
The power of digital forms and checklists
The use of electronic forms and checklists replaces the traditional pen-and-paper approach during shift handovers. Digital shift reports improve accessibility and readability, while links to in-depth details and added multimedia content ensure clarity. In advanced connected worker solutions, a pre-built shift handover template is available to improve speed to create and is accessible via QR scan, enabling manufacturers to capture and monitor data in real-time, increase visibility into production with actionable insights, boost workforce productivity by going paperless and reduce production inconsistencies through standard work. Score forms automatically speed up analysis and responses, while scheduled checklists support on-time completions.
Taking it a step further, a issue and visual management capabilities help make it faster and easier to identify deviations and solve problems. Built in issue and task creation with automatic notifications ensure visibility and rapid response to issues raised in shift handovers. The issue board can be filtered to aggregate issues for appropriate visibility to provide actionable insights to continually improve cross shift performance. It can also contribute to more engaged workers that will spur a culture of continuous improvement.
Don’t let shift handovers become the weak link
Today’s connected worker technologies make digital shift handovers not only possible but essential. There’s no longer a reason to rely on outdated or unreliable processes. Digital shift reports can help improve efficiency, safety and quality in manufacturing — in turn, reaping benefits for both employees and the business as a whole.
