Production tracking on most SMB floors is a whiteboard, an Excel sheet the supervisor updates at 10am and 2pm, and a phone call when something breaks. That's not visibility — that's reconstruction. Real production tracking is a dashboard you can glance at from the office that shows every workstation's state right now, with click-down to the build, the operator, and the WO if something's wrong.
The whiteboard updates twice a day. By the time the supervisor writes the morning numbers, four stations have already shifted state. The Excel rollup is half a day behind. The phone call from production to the office is the slowest API in the building. None of these are "tracking" — they're reports about a previous version of reality. Production tracking means the office screen matches the floor right now, with the same data.
Ignite Lean's supervisor floor view shows every workstation as a card. Green = build in progress, operator badged in, cycle time on pace. Yellow = paused (operator stepped away, awaiting parts, quality check). Red = downtime event open. Click any card → see the operator, the current step, the build duration so far, the WI on screen at that station. The data comes from the kiosks you're already running — no extra entry, no extra hardware.
Every build records a start timestamp at "Begin" and an end timestamp at "Done". The difference is your cycle time. Plotted per station over rolling 7/30/90 days, you see whether a station is trending faster (operator learning curve), slower (process drift, tooling wear), or noisy (training gaps). The number you used to estimate from a time study is now a continuously-measured live signal.
Every downtime event captures the reason code the operator picked. Rolled up by reason, by station, by line, by shift, by date range, you get the actual Pareto of where your floor is losing minutes. Setup changeovers? Quality holds? Tooling failures? Operator breaks? You don't have to guess, and you don't have to ask supervisors to reconstruct from memory. The data is in the kiosk events.
NCs flagged from the kiosk (defect, scrap, variance, supervisor-hold) roll up by two-level reason code, by station, by WI version, by shift, by operator. The auditor asks "where are most of your defects?" — one screen, no spreadsheet build. The continuous-improvement team gets a real list of what to attack first instead of vibes.
The first month, production tracking is a curiosity — "huh, didn't realize station 4 was paused that often". By month three, supervisors are checking the dashboard before walking the floor. By month six, leadership reviews production-tracking data in the weekly ops meeting instead of asking what happened. The conversation shifts from anecdotes to numbers. That's the real win.
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