Chapter 3 · Worksheet

The Handshake Audit

Not a test. There is no score and no right answer — you go and count, and it gives you your own numbers back.

This takes an afternoon and one production line. Not the whole plant — one line, walked end to end, with someone who knows it.

Go and count, then come back and enter what you found.

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Which line is this? (optional)

Count the systems, and the vendors behind them.

Count anything that holds or moves information, including the things nobody calls a system: the spreadsheet that holds the torque values, the printed sheet at the manual station, the label printer’s own software.

Systems

Vendors

List every place data crosses from one system to another

Do not try to count them in your head. Walk the line and add a row for each one. Each row is a handshake: someone, once, had to agree what passes between those two systems, in what format, at what moment, and what happens when it fails.

From

What passes

From

What passes

From

What passes

0 handshakes so far.

Name who controls the sequence, the rules and the data.

If the answer to any of them is the vendor, the PLC programmer, or a shrug, you have found something.

Who decides the order the work happens in?

Who decides the process rules — the torques, the checks, the tolerances?

Who owns the data this line produces?

Price your last process change.

Think of the last change made to this line. Not the engineering estimate — the real figure, and the calendar days from someone asking for it to the line running with it, including all the waiting.

What it cost

Calendar days it took

Estimate how much of your data arrives as evidence.

A torque value on its own is a number. The same value, tagged with the part, the variant, the station and the moment, is evidence. Estimate the share that is evidence.

50%

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Add at least one handshake to see your summary.