Field note
Quality notes that survive a shift handover
20 March 2025
Night-to-day handovers often lose the quality thread. A defect that appeared at 02:00 becomes a vague warning by 08:00, and the day shift rediscovers it the hard way.
Use three lines only: what failed, where on the line, and what was tried. Leave cost talk and root-cause essays for the quality meeting.
Attach one photo or one marked sample when the fault is visual. Words like “surface mark” mean different things across shifts.
Store the notes in the same place every day — a fixed clipboard or a shared folder with yesterday on top. Hunting for last night’s note wastes the first hour.
Once a week, a quality lead should scan the handover notes for repeating codes. Those repeats belong on the plant’s quality map, not only in the notebook.