From Quality Metrics to Electrical Panels: How to Read the Hidden Signals in Your Plant

Welcome to Issue #3 of FRAME. This week, we focus on a simple but powerful idea: the way people show up determines what improves.

In manufacturing, performance is not just about systems or strategy. It is about how leaders act, how teams work, and how clearly the operation reflects its priorities. Whether it is a plant manager showing up on the weekend, the condition of your electrical panels, or your ability to understand quality metrics, each example reveals the same truth.

Improvement starts with presence, awareness, and a willingness to act.

Modern Manufacturing Demands Engaged Technical Leadership

Last week, I had a series of conversations with manufacturing executives. In one of them, we veered into a discussion about leadership in today’s factories. Not systems. Not tools. But the people actually driving the work forward.

One story always comes to mind.

In 2015, while I was working at Procter & Gamble, I was responsible for engineering projects that involved bringing production lines from Italy and Japan to a site in the United States. As is often the case, the startup phase was rough. Sensors weren’t configured, equipment wasn’t aligned, product kept spilling onto the floor.

It was intense.

Several weekends in a row, we were onsite for long hours, trying to get machines running. I still remember the plant manager showing up. He wasn’t there to criticize or micromanage. He came to understand what we were dealing with. And more than that, he picked up a broom and helped clean up product waste.

This was someone four levels above me in the hierarchy: Plant Manager, Engineering Manager, Team Lead, then me.

He didn’t send a message through management. He showed up himself.

That stuck with me. In high-pressure environments, people don’t need more noise from the top. They need presence. They need engagement.

Now, contrast that with some of the conversations I’ve had more recently. I was told directly after one meeting that key directors and VPs on a digital initiative were already job hunting. They were not focused on their site’s future. No curiosity. No commitment. No real chance of success.

You can hire external consultants. You can invest in data infrastructure. But if your leadership is disengaged, none of it will matter.

Digital transformation does not begin with technology. It begins with leadership that is involved, committed, and willing to get close to the work.

Here’s the question:
Is your leadership fully engaged in building a better operation? Or are they already planning their next move?

Your Electrical Panels Reflect the Culture of Your Plant

One of the most reliable ways I’ve found to understand the state of a manufacturing operation is to open an electrical panel.

This is a habit I developed early in my career. Whenever I was brought on-site to help with a controls retrofit, automation upgrade, or facility assessment, I would take a moment during the tour to stop by a panel and see what was inside. Not because I was curious about that specific system, but because of what it signaled about the organization.

Over time, I began to notice a consistent pattern.

In some plants, the inside of a panel looks cleaner than the break room. Wiring is labeled and routed with care. There is no dust, no loose components, no debris. Spare relays and parts are properly stored. There is a clear sense that someone owns this piece of equipment and takes pride in how it’s maintained.

In other plants, the picture is different. I have opened panels filled with loose wires, pulled cable trays, missing covers, or an inch of dust thick enough to leave a fingerprint. In one extreme case, I found 480V lines partially submerged in standing water that had accumulated in the base of the enclosure.

What matters is not just the visual condition. What matters is what it reveals about how the site operates.

A clean panel often reflects a proactive, disciplined, and structured team. A messy panel tends to reflect firefighting, understaffing, and an absence of preventive systems. Over hundreds of site visits, this correlation has held true. What’s hidden behind a closed door often reveals more than what’s displayed on a KPI dashboard.

This is not about judgment. I have walked into many facilities where the team knows things are not where they should be. The real question is whether they are working to change that. Are they trying to build systems that support reliability? Are they planning upgrades? Are they investing in skills?

In many cases, the answer is no. And it is not for lack of desire. It is because the team is underwater.

According to the 2024 Deloitte and Manufacturing Institute report, over 75 percent of manufacturers report having difficulty filling critical roles in maintenance and engineering. Many plants are running legacy systems from five or more vendors, patched together over decades. Their best technicians are nearing retirement. Their new hires are hard to retain. And they simply do not have the bandwidth to plan and execute system-wide improvements.

What results is a vicious cycle. Panels stay in poor condition. Platform complexity increases. More time is spent reacting, and less time is available for redesign or prevention.

This is why the panel matters. Not as an isolated issue, but as a visible proxy for the hidden strain your operations may be under.

If your team is constantly in crisis mode, something is going to give. It may not be today, but it will happen. The smarter approach is to surface these signals early, build a roadmap, and start small but steady improvements.

Take a walk this week. Open one panel. Ask yourself what it says about your current culture. Then ask what it could look like six months from now, if you made it a priority.

Improvement starts behind the door.

Metrics that Matter – Understanding Quality on the Floor

I have to admit something. Early in my career, I didn’t enjoy working with quality departments.

They always felt like the ones slowing things down. Shutting off production. Flagging issues right as things were starting to run smoothly. In theory, they were supposed to be partners to operations and engineering. In practice, it often felt like we were working against each other.

That changed.

Once I started to actually understand the metrics coming from quality inspections, I realized we were chasing the same goals. The problem wasn’t the data. The problem was the disconnect in how we used it.

In most manufacturing environments today, a lot of quality inspections are still done manually. You will often see dedicated labs in food and beverage facilities, where technicians run pH checks, moisture tests, or other product validations. These tests are essential. They help ensure that what gets shipped is safe for consumption.

In other verticals like automotive or electronics, the purpose of quality inspections can vary. Sometimes the goal is to confirm that a part meets a customer specification. Other times, it is to make sure a downstream process won’t be disrupted by a small variation upstream.

Regardless of the industry, every quality inspection produces a data point. And every data point tells a story. The question is whether your team knows how to read it.

Let’s take a simple example. Say you are drilling five holes in an aluminum part. A vision system counts the holes. If it detects fewer or more than five, it rejects the part. This is a basic pass-fail check based on an integer count.

But most real-world inspections involve continuous measurements. Nothing produced is ever perfect. There will always be some level of variation. The key is understanding how much variation is acceptable.

For example, if the spec calls for a part that is 10.00 centimeters long, does a part measuring 10.01 centimeters still pass? That depends entirely on your tolerance range. If the acceptable window is plus or minus 1 millimeter, then yes, it passes. If the limit is plus or minus 0.1 millimeter, then it fails.

This is what quality metrics actually tell you. Not just whether a product passed or failed, but how close your process is running to its limits. Is it centered? Is it drifting? Are the failures random, or is there a trend forming?

In my experience, many engineers and managers struggle to answer these questions. They see rising reject rates but can’t explain why. They don’t know if a recent spike is just noise or a real sign of process instability. They miss opportunities to make improvements because they don’t fully understand what the data is telling them.

This is where the real value lies.

By learning what each metric means, you can begin to spot patterns. You can trace defects back to specific machines, materials, or shift teams. You can run simple experiments and track whether a change actually improves the outcome. And most importantly, you can reduce the amount of waste that piles up before anyone notices something is wrong.

Here is my advice to every manufacturing leader:

• Take time to understand your critical quality metrics.

• Know what the tolerances are, and what happens when they are exceeded.

• Learn how your process variables influence those outcomes.

• Review the trends, not just yesterday’s results.

• Build a response plan that kicks in before things reach the red zone.

Quality data is not a burden. It is a signal. Learn to listen, and it becomes one of your most valuable tools.

Career Shift – Document What You Know to Unlock Opportunities

I have worked in some of the most rigorously documented environments, like medical device manufacturing at Procter & Gamble, and in some of the least documented ones, such as a fast-moving software startup.

What I have learned is this: no one enjoys writing documentation. It rarely feels urgent. It often gets dismissed as low-value. People would much rather build, fix, or implement than write about it.

But the ability to document your work is one of the most powerful habits you can build in your career.

In fact, the people who consistently get promoted are often the ones who find a way to make themselves replaceable. That does not mean they are no longer needed. It means they create systems, train others, and build repeatable processes that allow the organization to grow. When they are promoted, they leave behind something that others can follow.

Think about it from a leadership perspective. Would you rather keep someone in a role indefinitely because no one else knows how to do the job, or would you promote the person who built a process and trained a replacement while continuing to solve more complex problems?

This sounds simple. But in practice, asking your manager for more time to “write documentation” will rarely go well.

A better approach is to start with your own time. Where are you spending the most energy each week? Which tasks keep showing up on your calendar? Where are you answering the same questions again and again?

That is where documentation should begin.

Let me share a real example.

An engineer I worked with spent about 30 percent of his time doing CAD work. It was not his core skill, and it pulled him away from other high-value responsibilities. His hourly cost to the business was high, and he was not the most efficient at drafting because of how many other tasks he had to manage.

He had a few options. He could keep doing the work himself. He could hire an external contractor. Or he could make the case to bring someone in-house to take over the work completely.

He chose the third option. But to make it successful, he had to spend time documenting the CAD standards, file storage rules, revision process, and how projects were scoped. That took time and effort, and it required him to slow down in the short term.

The projected return on investment was around three months. In reality, it took five. But once the process was in place, the company had a dedicated designer who was faster, more cost-effective, and fully ramped. The engineer moved on to lead larger automation initiatives. Everyone won.

The lesson is simple. Documentation is not just about writing things down. It is about scaling yourself.

In manufacturing, every role has some repetitive component that can be standardized, structured, or offloaded with the right documentation. Creating that clarity is not busywork. It is leadership.

If you want to grow your career, start by making what you know usable by others. That is how you free yourself to do more meaningful work. That is how you become someone your organization cannot afford to keep in the same role for long.

Conclusion

Operational performance is not about heroic effort. It is about creating clarity, building routines, and making better decisions over time.

If leadership is present, if systems reflect reality, and if data is understood, improvement becomes consistent and sustainable. That is true on the plant floor, in quality labs, and in personal careers.

I hope something in this issue helps you take a step forward. As always, thank you for reading. And if you found value here, consider sharing it with someone who wants to do better work

📚 Further Reading & Resources

If this issue sparked something for you, here are some of the best resources to go deeper into the ideas discussed:

1. The Manufacturing Institute – Workforce & Leadership Reports
Key insights into the manufacturing labor shortage, leadership trends, and what’s holding back operational improvement.

2. The Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI)
A practical library of case studies, tools, and thinking around Lean, continuous improvement, and factory culture.

3. ISA – International Society of Automation
Technical standards and thought leadership on controls, instrumentation, and system reliability — ideal for those working behind the panel.

4. MIT Sloan Management Review – Leadership & Culture
High-quality writing on how leadership behavior influences performance, especially under pressure.

5. Control Engineering Magazine
Industry news and application insights for engineers and managers dealing with plant systems, automation, and infrastructure challenges.

6. FRAMEXL Archives
Explore past FRAME issues for more insights on digital transformation, technical leadership, and building better manufacturing teams..