OperationalPlaybook Guide

How to Run a SQDIP Tier Meeting

Most daily huddles are a status report read aloud to people who already know the status. Everyone stands around, the supervisor talks for ten minutes, nothing gets decided, and the group drifts back to the floor. By Thursday people are finding reasons to skip it.

A SQDIP tier meeting is the fix, but only if you run it as a decision engine, not a news broadcast. SQDIP stands for Safety, Quality, Delivery, Inventory, and Productivity, the five categories that cover almost everything that can go wrong on a manufacturing floor. The tier meeting is a short, daily, stand-up huddle in front of a visual board where the team scores each category green or red and acts on the reds. This guide gives you the board, the script, and the traps.

What Each Letter Tracks

The five categories, in order, every day:

Safety. Any incident, near miss, or new hazard since yesterday. Safety goes first, always. It signals what the floor values.
Quality. Scrap, rework, defects, customer complaints, holds. Did we make good parts yesterday?
Delivery. Did we ship what we promised, on time? Are we on pace for today’s schedule?
Inventory. Material shortages, overstock, WIP piling up between cells, parts you are about to run out of.
Productivity. Output versus plan, downtime, efficiency. Did we make the numbers, and if not, why?

Each category gets one thing: a green or a red for yesterday. Green means the standard was met. Red means it was not. The board is a grid of greens and reds, and the meeting is about the reds. That is the entire mental model.

The Daily Huddle Script

Keep it to ten minutes or less, same time every day, standing up, at the board. Here is the minute-by-minute.

Open (30 seconds). Supervisor calls it to order at the posted time. Late is not waited for. The meeting starting on time, every time, is half the discipline.
Walk the five letters (4 to 5 minutes). Go S, Q, D, I, P in order. For each, the owner marks green or red for yesterday in one sentence. “Safety, green, no incidents.” “Quality, red, four scrapped housings on Line 2.” Greens get a sentence and you move on. Do not narrate the greens.
Stop on every red (3 to 4 minutes). For each red, ask two questions only: what happened, and who owns the fix. Capture the action on the board with an owner and a date. You are not solving the problem at the board. You are assigning it. Deep dives happen offline with the right people, not while ten people stand and watch two people debate.
Review yesterday’s open actions (1 minute). Run the action list. What closed, what is still open, what is overdue. An action list where nothing ever closes is why huddles die.
Close (30 seconds). One sentence on the focus for today. Done.

That is it. The skill is discipline, not content. Walk the letters, stop on red, assign the fix, check yesterday’s actions, close. Same shape every single day.

Escalate the Reds That Stick

A tier meeting is a tier of a system, hence the name. A red your shift cannot fix in a day escalates up to the next tier, the one that has the authority or resources to fix it. A material shortage you cannot resolve goes to the planning tier. A recurring quality red goes to engineering. The board makes escalation visible: a red that stays red for three days is a red that needs to leave your tier and go up.

This is what separates a tier meeting from a huddle. The huddle surfaces the problem. The tier structure routes it to whoever can actually close it. Without escalation, your reds just pile up and the team learns the board does not lead anywhere.

The Board Mistakes That Kill the Habit

A clean board does not save you from these. Watch for all three.

Talking through the greens. The fastest way to blow your ten minutes is to narrate every category in detail whether it is green or red. Green is one sentence, then move. The meeting belongs to the reds.

Solving at the board. Two people start debating root cause while eight people stand and lose interest. Catch it and cut it: “Good, that is a red, who owns it, take it offline.” The board assigns problems. It does not solve them.

The action list nobody closes. If reds get logged and never closed, the team figures out in two weeks that the board is decoration. Run the open actions every single day. Closing two things reliably beats logging twenty and resolving none.

The honest test of a SQDIP board is not whether it is full of green. It is whether reds turn into closed actions inside a few days. A board that is all green every day is usually a board nobody is being honest with.

Stand Up Your Board This Week

The SQDIP Tier Meeting System gives you the whole thing ready to run: the daily SQDIP board in Excel with Safety, Quality, Delivery, Inventory, and Productivity already laid out, green and red status tracking, an action log that rolls day to day with owners and due dates, and a printable board layout you can post on the floor. Sample data is filled in so your team can see a working board on day one. White-label placeholders throughout. It will not run the meeting for you, but it removes every bit of setup so you can huddle tomorrow. It is in the OperationalPlaybook Etsy shop.