A173 | The Production Plan Meeting That Moved to the Floor — and What Changed When It Did

For most of the factory's history, the weekly production planning meeting happened in the conference room. The production manager, the section leads, sometimes the sales team — they would sit around a table, look at a printed schedule, discuss what was coming in the next week, identify any potential clashes or bottlenecks, and make decisions about sequencing and resource allocation. It was a functional meeting. It produced a plan. People left knowing what was supposed to happen.

About two years ago, we moved the meeting to the factory floor. Not permanently — there are still situations where a conference room makes sense — but as the default. The weekly planning session now happens at a folding table set up in the weaving section, with the looms running in the background and the section leads standing rather than sitting. It lasts about thirty minutes rather than the previous hour.

Why We Made the Change

The immediate reason was a specific problem that had been recurring for several months. The weekly plan would be produced in the conference room, signed off, and then almost immediately encounter a reality on the floor that required adjustment. A loom that was scheduled for a particular pattern would turn out to need a setup time longer than the plan assumed. A colour change sequence that looked clean on paper would turn out to create a production flow problem that the section lead could see immediately but that was not visible from a printed schedule.

The adjustments were usually small, and the section leads were capable of making them. But the cumulative effect of weekly small adjustments was that the plan produced in the conference room was rarely what actually happened on the floor, and the plan document stopped being a useful reference by midweek. By the time a customer query came in about a specific order, the answer was in the section lead's head, not in any written document.

The suggestion to move the meeting came from the weaving section lead, who pointed out that several of the questions that came up in every planning meeting — "how long will the setup take?", "can this loom run this pattern next?", "what's the current state of the beam loading?" — could be answered in thirty seconds by walking to the relevant machine, and that answering them from memory or estimation in a conference room was producing less accurate plans. The suggestion was simple and made sense, so we tried it.

What Changed

Several things changed that we had not fully anticipated.

The most significant was the quality of information in the plan itself. When the planning conversation happened beside the machines, the section leads could answer questions about current state with certainty rather than estimation. "Can we fit this order in before the beam change?" became a question answered by looking at the current beam loading, not by recalling approximately how much had been run that week. The plan that came out of the floor meeting was more accurate from the start.

The second change was that workers who were not part of the formal meeting became aware of what was being planned. The floor meeting is not private in the way a conference room meeting is — other workers can hear parts of it, and the presence of management and section leads at a folding table in the middle of the section signals that something is being discussed. In practice, this means workers sometimes contribute useful information ("the tension on loom seven has been fluctuating this week, might be worth flagging") without being formally invited to. Some of this information would not have surfaced in a conference room setting at all.

The third change was more subtle. The section leads became more engaged with the planning process, because the planning process was now happening in their domain rather than in management's. The conference room is management territory; the factory floor is theirs. Holding the meeting there changed the power dynamic in a small but meaningful way, and we think it contributed to the section leads taking more ownership of the plan rather than treating it as something handed down to them.

A Broader Point About Where Decisions Get Made

The floor meeting is one example of something we have been thinking about more deliberately in the past few years: the question of where decisions should happen in the factory. The default assumption in many manufacturing operations is that decisions happen in offices and are implemented on the floor. The floor meeting is a small step in the other direction — moving one type of decision closer to the place where the information needed to make it actually lives.

We are not arguing that all decisions should work this way. Some decisions require information that is not on the floor — commercial considerations, multi-week scheduling, resource allocation across sections. Those decisions are still made in offices with spreadsheets and order books. But for the specific class of decisions where the key information is physical and current, proximity to the reality matters. We have found it useful to ask, for any recurring decision, where the best information for making it actually is — and to move the decision toward the information, rather than moving the information (imperfectly) to a conference room.

We want to be honest about the limits of this change. The floor meeting is better for operational planning. It is not better for conversations that require privacy, extended discussion of sensitive topics, or focus without the ambient noise and interruptions of a running production floor. We still use the conference room for those. The floor meeting works specifically because it is short, practically oriented, and benefits from proximity to the physical reality being planned. A meeting that requires two hours of discussion would not work this way.

The plan that comes out of the floor meeting is still a plan — it still requires adjustment as the week unfolds, and the section leads still make those adjustments as they come. What has changed is that the starting point is more accurate, and the section leads feel more ownership over it. That combination has made the adjustment process less friction-heavy, because the people doing the adjusting were also the people who made the original plan and understand why it was made the way it was.

We mention this because the change sounds small and looks small from the outside — moving a meeting thirty metres from a conference room to a factory floor. But the effects have been real, and they came from something that cost nothing to implement and required no approval process beyond a section lead making a reasonable suggestion. That is, we think, the best kind of operational improvement.