What I look for in the first two weeks

Every plant I have walked into had a list of problems. Late deliveries, turnover, numbers nobody trusted, decisions stuck at the top, margin leaking somewhere. The list is real. It is also a symptom.

Underneath is a business that runs on a few people's memory and effort. That is what each of those problems looks like on the floor. So the first two weeks are not about fixing. They are about finding which constraint is doing most of the damage: demand, capacity, maintenance, quality, planning, data or leadership.

I look at three things. Where the schedule gets changed and by whom. Where the numbers the floor believes differ from the numbers the system reports. And where work stops when one person is out of the office.

By day 15 there is an answer, and a recovery plan for whichever of delivery, quality or cash is bleeding fastest. Then a daily production meeting with clear owners, so the plan survives the week.

From day 30 the work is the system: scorecards, decision rights, a demand-and-supply cadence and the data to run it. That is what a permanent leader should inherit. A working system, not a list of fires.