SQCDP Daily Performance Board

What an SQCDP board is

CM8-222 is a digital SQCDP board — the daily performance board found at the heart of lean daily management in factories all over the world. The idea comes from the Toyota tradition of visual management: every working area reviews yesterday's performance against five standing headings — Safety, Quality, Cost, Delivery and People — and marks each one green, amber or red, in a short stand-up meeting at the start of the day. Problems surface within twenty-four hours of happening, while the trail is still warm, and anything the area cannot fix itself is escalated to the next meeting up — the tiered meeting structure that many organisations run as tier 1 (cell), tier 2 (value stream or department) and tier 3 (site).

You will meet the same board under several names — SQDC, SQDCP, SQDCM (with M for Morale) — and with the letters in slightly different orders. The mechanics are identical: a colour a day per heading, a reason for every miss, and a countermeasure with an owner and a date. This tool records those entries, works out the green rate, shows where the reds concentrate, tracks the countermeasures to completion, and prints a report you can take to the next tier meeting.

Everything runs in this single file. There is no account, no upload and no network request of any kind, so the board's contents never leave the computer you are using.

What each letter means

The letters are deliberately broad. Each area chooses one or two concrete measures per letter that it can actually influence and can score every single day. Typical choices:

• Letter — Stands for — Typical daily measures
• S — Safety — Injuries and near misses reported, unsafe conditions found and fixed, safety checks completed
• Q — Quality — Defects found, first-pass yield, customer complaints received, containment actions in force
• C — Cost — Scrap value, overtime hours against plan, consumable spend, energy against budget
• D — Delivery — On-time-in-full, units produced against schedule, order backlog, changeover time
• P — People — Attendance, skill-matrix coverage for the day's plan, training completed, improvement suggestions

Pick measures the team can read from its own work, not figures that arrive from a finance system three weeks later. A board only changes behaviour when the people standing in front of it recognise the numbers as their own.

Making entries

One entry is one day, one area, one letter. The date and the area are required; the letter and the status carry the meaning. The measured value and target are optional — many boards run on colour alone — but recording the numbers makes the gap visible and keeps the colour honest.

• Green — on target, no issue. Nothing further is needed.
• Amber — a contained issue: something went wrong but the day's target survived, or the problem is understood and being managed. Write the issue down; ambers are tomorrow's reds.
• Red — the target was missed. The tool will not accept a red without the issue written down, because a red with no explanation is just a decoration.

Every issue can carry a countermeasure with an owner, a due date and an action status. The tool refuses an entry marked complete with no countermeasure recorded — if something was done, say what.

Running the daily meeting

The daily board meeting should take about ten minutes, standing up, at the same time every day. A shape that works:

• Minute 1–2: walk the letters. Yesterday's colour for each of S, Q, C, D, P. Greens get a nod, not a discussion.
• Minute 3–7: the reds and new ambers. What happened, what is the countermeasure, who owns it, when will it be done. New issues get an owner before the meeting ends.
• Minute 8–9: open countermeasures from previous days. Anything overdue is asked about by name and date — the Open countermeasures table in this tool is that list.
• Minute 10: what needs escalating to the next tier, and today's focus.

Two habits keep the meeting worth having. First, the board is filled in before the meeting, not during it. Second, no problem-solving at the board — the meeting decides who will solve it and by when, then moves on. Anything that needs twenty minutes gets its own conversation with the right people afterwards.

How the green rate is calculated

The green rate on the tiles, the monthly trend and the letter summary all use the same simple formula:

Ambers and reds both count against the rate; an amber is not half a green. The rate is calculated over whatever the current filter shows, so filtering to one letter or one area gives you that slice's rate, and the monthly chart applies the formula month by month.

Be honest about what the figure can carry. It counts entries, not days — if the board was not filled in, nothing is counted, and a gap in the record silently flatters the rate. A month with a handful of entries will swing wildly, which is why the trend chart shows the counts in brackets next to each month's percentage. Use the rate to start conversations, not to rank teams — the fastest way to a 100 % green board is to stop admitting ambers, which is precisely the failure the board exists to prevent.

The gap column

Where both a measured value and a target are recorded, the register shows the gap:

The direction of "good" depends on the measure. For output or on-time percentage, a positive gap is favourable; for near misses, defects, scrap cost or overtime, lower is better and a positive gap is the problem. The tool does not guess which way round your measure runs — it shows the arithmetic and leaves the judgement with the colour you chose. The gap is highlighted only on red entries, where the status itself already says the result was a miss.

Red discipline

The value of the board is decided by what happens to the reds. The working rule is short: every red gets a countermeasure, an owner and a date — that day. Not a task force, not a paragraph of analysis: one named person, one concrete next step, one date it will be reviewed.

Distinguish containment from countermeasure. Sorting the affected parts, apologising to the customer or working the weekend contains the problem; the countermeasure is whatever stops it happening again — a guard interlock tested, a packing insert added, a safety stock set. Boards whose countermeasure column is full of containment explain why the same red returns every few weeks.

Reds that the area cannot close itself are escalation material. Take the printed report to the next tier meeting with the Reds-by-area chart and the Open countermeasures table, and ask for the specific help needed — a decision, money, or another department's time. Escalating a problem is the system working, not an admission of failure. Overdue countermeasures are marked in the table for the same reason: a due date that quietly slides is how a board decays into wallpaper.

Printing and sharing

Print Report produces a report from whatever the current filter shows: the headline tiles, all four charts, the letter summary, the open countermeasures and the full register, followed by your notes. Print to PDF to circulate it or to keep a month-end snapshot.

The scope line under the title states the filter in force. Clear the filters before issuing anything described as the full period.

Saving your work

Entries, settings and the report header are written to this browser's local storage as you type, and the toolbar shows the time of the last save. That storage belongs to one browser on one computer: another browser, a private window, a second machine or a clean-up tool that clears site data will not have it.

Treat Export .json as the real save — one file containing everything, which Import .json restores anywhere. Export CSV gives you the register for spreadsheet work and includes every filtered record, not only those drawn on screen. Reset asks twice, then erases everything this tool has stored. There is no undo.

FAQ

We use SQDC, not SQCDP — does the order matter? No. The letter order varies between organisations and none of the calculations depend on it. If you do not use a letter, simply never select it; the charts and summaries only show letters that have entries.

Should we make an entry for every letter every day, even when everything is green? Yes, if you can. A deliberate green is information; a blank is silence. The days-covered tile and the bracketed counts on the trend chart exist so you can see how complete the record actually is.

One board for the site, or one per area? One per area, reviewed by the people who do the work — that is what the area field is for. Use the filter to look at one area, and the printed report to roll areas up for the next tier.

Can an amber skip the countermeasure? The tool only insists on an issue description for reds, but a written issue and owner on an amber is cheap insurance — most reds were ambers first.

What green rate should we target? There is no universal figure. Set the target in Settings to something demanding for your operation and pay more attention to the trend and to how fast reds close than to the absolute number.

Accuracy & disclaimer

This tool records what you enter and calculates from it. It cannot know whether a day's colour was honest, whether the board was filled in at all, or whether a countermeasure actually worked — and every figure on the report depends on those things. The green rate reflects entries made, not days worked.

A performance board is a conversation aid. Recording a safety red here does not replace your incident reporting arrangements, a quality red does not replace complaint handling or your quality system, and nothing in this tool is legal, regulatory or professional advice.