Shift Handover Log

What this tool does

CM8-246 is a shift handover log. One row is one thing the outgoing shift needs the incoming shift to know: a safety condition, where production got to, a quality hold, an equipment fault and the workaround in force, a shortage, an absence, or an action that has to happen next. Each item carries a priority, an owner, a status and — the part that matters most — a record of whether the incoming shift acknowledged it. The Reports tab prints the latest handover as a sheet you can carry onto the floor, and shows what is still open across every shift. Everything runs inside this single file: no account, no upload and no network request of any kind, so names, faults and figures stay on the machine you are using.

Why handover is where information dies

In any operation running across shifts, the change of shift is the highest-risk moment of the day. Everything one team knows — the noise that started at two in the morning, the guard that dropped out twice, the batch never signed off, the flow valve deliberately turned down that must stay there — exists only in their heads. Twenty minutes later they are in the car park and the people running the plant know none of it. Nothing physically changed; the plant simply lost its memory. Usually that costs an hour of rediscovery. Occasionally it costs far more, because what did not get passed on was the reason a machine was isolated, or the fact that somebody was still working inside a guard. Investigations into serious industrial events return to the shift change again and again, and rarely because anyone was negligent: the information existed, somebody meant to pass it on, and it fell into the gap between two busy teams.

What belongs in a handover

A handover is not a diary of the shift. Nobody reads a diary, and burying the item that matters in twenty that do not is the commonest way a good handover fails. Three things belong in it:

• State — what is running, what is stopped, what is isolated, what is quarantined, and what is set differently from normal and why.
• Exceptions — faults, workarounds, shortages, absences, holds, anything deviating from the standard set-up.
• Actions — what the next shift has to do, who owns it, and by when.

The test for any item is simple: if I do not tell them this, what will go wrong? If nothing goes wrong, leave it out — "ran to plan, no issues" is a complete production entry. Write the summary so somebody walking in cold understands it without opening the detail. "Pump noisy" is not a handover. "Wash station coolant pump noisy — running at reduced flow, do not open the valve" is.

The eight item types, and why structure beats a blank notebook

A blank notebook is the commonest handover tool in the world and the worst: it records whatever the outgoing lead thought of in the two minutes before leaving — thorough on a quiet shift, thin on the shift that needed it. A structured list works the other way round. It prompts.

• Type — Use it for
• Safety — Conditions, incidents, near misses, hazards, isolations
• Production status — Where you got to against plan, and why the gap exists
• Quality — Holds, quarantines, rework, inspections not yet signed
• Equipment — Faults, workarounds in force, machines awaiting repair
• Material — Shortages, substitutions, deliveries that did not arrive
• People — Absence, cover arranged, competence limits, training not signed off
• Action required — Anything the next shift must do, with an owner
• For information — Visitors, planned outages — worth knowing, nothing to do

Running down eight headings takes ninety seconds and catches the item you would otherwise have forgotten, because the heading asks the question for you. A shift that only ever files production status is not handing over — it is reading out a number.

The acknowledgement discipline

A handover nobody received did not happen. This is the classic failure, and it is why the unacknowledged tile is the alarm on this tool rather than a footnote.

Every item can be marked acknowledged, with the name of the person who took it. The tool will not let you name a receiver without ticking acknowledged, and will not let you close an item that was never acknowledged — an item nobody received cannot honestly be one somebody finished. Any item from a previous day still unacknowledged is flagged red in the register and counted on the tile.

Treat that count the way you would treat an overdue safety action. One unacknowledged item is a conversation; a pattern of them is a handover process that has quietly stopped working — usually because the leads no longer overlap, or because one shift does not believe the sheet is worth reading.

Written and verbal — the sheet supports the conversation

This log does not replace the handover; it supports it. The real handover is two people standing at the machine with the sheet in hand, looking at the thing being described. The sheet gives the conversation an agenda, stops things being forgotten under time pressure, and leaves a record. Anything genuinely important gets said and written: said so it is understood, written so it survives the next four shifts. If you rely on the sheet alone because the shifts no longer overlap, fix the overlap — the sheet is not the fix.

Critical items and stopping the line

Critical means one thing: act on it before anything else runs. Reserve it for items where continuing normal operation is not safe or not acceptable — a compromised guard, a defeated interlock, an isolation still in place, product that must not be despatched. The tool will not save a critical item without the action written out, because "critical, see me" is not a handover. Everybody on shift must know they may stop the line on a critical item without asking permission first, and that nobody will be criticised for stopping when it turns out to be less serious than it read. If that authority is not real on your site, the priority field is decoration.

Carried items — the warning sign

Marking an item carried is honest: the outgoing shift did not deal with it and is passing it on. One carry is normal. Three shifts carrying the same item means nobody owns it, and it will keep being carried until it becomes an incident. The fix is rarely to tell the shifts to try harder: give the item to somebody there every day — maintenance planning, stores, engineering — with a date, and take it off the shift teams entirely.

Running the ten-minute overlap

1. Last twenty minutes. The outgoing lead writes up, going down the eight item types in order: summary line first, detail second, action last.
2. Open or print the latest handover from the Reports tab.
3. Ten minutes, both leads, on the floor. Walk the critical and high items at the machine. The incoming lead asks questions; the outgoing lead does not leave until they stop.
4. Acknowledge, item by item. Anything the incoming lead will not take is discussed now, not left blank.
5. During the shift. Update statuses as things are done, and mark honestly what is carried.

Ten minutes of paid overlap on every shift change is the cheapest reliability improvement most operations can make.

This is the handover log, not the shift planner

Two different jobs share the word "shift". A shift planner or roster answers who works when — names against dates and shifts, coverage against required headcount, hours and overtime. This tool answers what the outgoing shift told the incoming one. The roster is written before the week starts; the handover log at the end of every shift. Keep them separate: a roster full of operational notes is unreadable, and a handover log trying to be a rota loses what it is for.

What the tool calculates

Two notes on honesty. Days open is counted in days, not shifts, because the tool does not know your pattern — on a three-shift rotation two days is roughly six shifts, and the ageing threshold is a setting. Acknowledgement rate counts every item in the filter, including today's items nobody has yet had the chance to receive, so it reads low on a log you have just written; the unacknowledged tile is the stricter measure, counting only items from before today.

FAQ

One row per item, or one row per handover? One row per item. A handover is several rows sharing a date, shift and area, and the tool reassembles them into a sheet. Where two areas hand over at the same time, each area's items form its own handover.

Should the incoming shift add items? No. The log is what the outgoing shift passes on; anything the incoming shift finds belongs in their own handover. That keeps the record of who knew what, and when, straight.

How long should we keep the log? Longer than you think — it is often the only contemporaneous record of a plant condition, and becomes evidence during an investigation. Export weekly and archive it; retention periods differ by country and industry, so establish what applies.

Can it prove a handover happened? No. It records that somebody ticked a box. That is useful, and it is not the same thing.

Saving your work

Items, settings and the report header are written to this browser's local storage as you type. That storage belongs to one browser on one computer; on a shared shop-floor terminal, check it is not set to clear data on exit. Treat Export .json as the real save — one file containing everything, which Import .json restores anywhere. Export CSV gives you the log for spreadsheet work. Reset asks twice, then erases everything stored. There is no undo.

Accuracy & disclaimer

This tool records what somebody wrote down and counts it faithfully. It cannot record what was said at the machine, what was noticed and not mentioned, or whether the person receiving the shift understood what they were taking. An acknowledgement here means a box was ticked — not that anything was walked or checked. Use the printed sheet as the agenda and the record for a face-to-face handover, never as a replacement for one. Nothing here overrides your site's rules on permits to work, isolation, lock-off, competence or communication at shift change, and nothing here is safety, engineering or legal advice.