Lean Opportunity Register

What this tool does

CM8-356 is the front end of an improvement system. It catches every opportunity somebody spots on the floor, sizes it in money, ranks it by return on the effort it takes, triages it into something that can actually be done, and then tracks honestly how many ever turn into a benefit anybody has confirmed.

Everything runs inside this single file — no account, no upload, no network request of any kind.

How this differs from a CI register

A continuous improvement register tracks improvement projects: things somebody has already decided to do. This tracks observations, most of which will never become projects, and that is the point.

The interesting number in this tool is not the benefit total. It is the funnel: a hundred observations, sixty triaged, thirty approved, twelve done, four verified. Every organisation running improvement has a funnel like that and almost none of them can see it, which is why the same conversation about "engagement" happens every year when the actual problem is that nothing raised on a Tuesday ever gets looked at again.

What one row is

One row is one observation: something somebody saw, in one place, that is not right. Not one idea, and not one project. If three people notice the same walk to the far store, that is one row with a better description, not three.

Log things you cannot size. "No benefit that can be sized yet" is a real option and the tool respects it: an unsized opportunity is excluded from every benefit total and flagged as Not sized rather than quietly counted as zero. A register that only accepts fully worked-up ideas will receive almost nothing.

Sizing an opportunity

Three ways, and the tool picks the arithmetic from the one you choose:

Use working weeks, not 52. A saving that only happens when the line runs is not earned during the shutdown, and 46 versus 52 is a 13% difference in every number this tool produces.

Be careful with hours. An hour a week saved across five people is five hours, not one — but only if those hours turn into something. Where saved time simply becomes slack, say so in the notes and expect the verified figure to come in low. That is not a failure of the tool; it is the most common reason lean savings do not appear in accounts.

Effort, in days

The four effort levels convert to days so that benefit can be divided by something:

These are conventions, stated here so you can disagree with them. What matters is that they are consistent, because their only job is to rank opportunities against each other.

Triage

Every opportunity should leave its first review with one of four labels, and the tool flags anything that never got one:

• Just do it — somebody fixes it this week without asking permission. Most of the value in most registers is here. A just-do-it still sitting after a fortnight is flagged, because a just-do-it that needs a project plan was mis-triaged.
• Kaizen — a short focused improvement with an owner and a date.
• Project — real planning and real money. The tool flags anything triaged as a project worth less than your project floor: small ideas should be done, not managed.
• Parked — genuine, but not now, with a reason. Parked is honest; leaving something at "raised" for a year is not.

Benefit per day of effort

This, not benefit alone, is the order to work through the list in. A four-hundred-pound fix that takes two hours returns more per day of attention than a twenty-thousand-pound project that takes three months, and if you only have this week it is strictly better.

Working the register in benefit order is how improvement programmes end up with three big projects running and forty trivial irritations untouched — which is also how they lose the goodwill of the people who raised the forty.

The funnel

Five stages: raised, triaged, approved, change made, benefit verified. The chart and the conversion table show how many survive each step and how many are lost.

Read the biggest drop, not the final number. A large drop between raised and triaged means nobody is reviewing the register. A large drop between approved and done means people are agreeing to things they have no capacity to do. A large drop between done and verified — much the most common — means changes are being made and nobody ever checks whether they worked.

Verified beats claimed

Two benefit figures are tracked and they are never added together.

Claimed is what the sizing arithmetic produces from your estimate. Verified is what somebody measured after the change was made, entered by hand, with a date. The tool will not let you mark something verified without both the figure and the date, and it will accept a verified benefit of zero — which is an important thing to be able to record.

The conversion table shows verified benefit as a percentage of what was claimed on the same opportunities. In most organisations the first time that number is calculated it comes as a shock, and it is the single most useful figure in this tool for improving how sizing is done.

The haircut

Anything not yet verified is discounted before it appears in a total:

Forty percent by default, because unverified improvement claims are optimistic in a way that is well documented and consistent. Set it from your own record once you have enough verified opportunities to know your ratio — the conversion table gives you exactly that number.

Stale opportunities

An opportunity raised more than your stale threshold ago and still sitting at "raised" is flagged. So is a just-do-it more than a fortnight old, and anything past its target date.

Clearing stale rows matters more than it looks. A register visibly full of things raised eighteen months ago and never touched teaches everybody that raising things is pointless, and it takes about two years to recover from that. Drop them honestly, or park them with a reason.

What this does not do

• It does not manage projects. Anything triaged as a project needs a plan somewhere else.
• It does not verify anything. Verification is somebody going and measuring, and typing the result in.
• It does not know whether two opportunities overlap. Two rows claiming the same saved hour will both count it, and only a person can spot that.
• It does not know whether saved time was ever converted into output. That is the difference between a benefit and a number.

Printing and sharing

The Report tab prints the tiles, charts and both tables with a title block you fill in. Filter to one area before printing for a team board, or to unverified changes before a review.

Saving your work

The register is held in this browser, on this computer, and stays there between visits. Use the backup button to write a JSON file you control; the spreadsheet download gives you the same rows.

Accuracy & disclaimer

Every benefit here comes from figures you entered. The tool multiplies, ranks and counts; it has no view about whether a saving is real, whether an idea is safe to implement, or whether a change will hold. A claimed benefit is a claim until the verified column says otherwise, and the tool is built to keep saying so.