How to Run a Plant Assessment Before Buying Any Software

Before a plant spends money on software, it should be able to answer a simple question: which three problems, if solved, would make the biggest difference to output, cost or cash? Surprisingly few can answer it with evidence.

A plant assessment is a short, structured study that produces that answer. Here is how we run one, and how you can run one yourself.

Set the scope in one page

Define the plant or business unit, the products in scope, the questions leadership wants answered and who will sponsor the work. Keep it to one page. If the sponsor cannot name the top questions, start with a short leadership interview to draw them out.

Track 1: People — interview top to bottom

Talk to the plant head, production, maintenance, quality, stores, purchase, planning, accounts and sales — and to supervisors and operators on every shift. Ask the same core questions in each interview: what slows you down, what do you double-check, what do you do in Excel or on paper, and what would you fix first.

Patterns appear by the tenth interview. When the night-shift supervisor and the CFO independently describe the same problem, you have found something real.

• Plan 45 minutes per manager, 20 minutes per supervisor or operator.
• Interview in their workplace, not in a meeting room.
• Write down workarounds — they are the clearest signal of broken process.

Track 2: Process — walk the value stream

Follow material from the gate to dispatch, and orders from enquiry to invoice. Photograph registers, whiteboards and forms. Note every hand-off, every re-entry of the same data, and every wait. Do at least one walk on a night shift — it is often a different plant.

Track 3: Data — what exists and can it be trusted?

List every system and spreadsheet in use, who owns it, how often it is updated and what it feeds. Take samples — a month of production entries, a quarter of breakdown records — and check completeness and consistency. Survey machines: which have PLCs, which signals are available, which protocols.

Size the losses

Use loss trees to break the big problems into measurable branches — yield, downtime, inventory, cost accuracy, cycle time, reporting effort. For each branch, estimate the current level from the data you have, note the confidence, and estimate a realistic improvement range.

Be conservative and transparent. A value estimate that the CFO can trace back to plant data is worth more than an impressive number nobody believes.

Prioritise

Score each opportunity and plot value against effort. Pick one or two that are high-value and achievable as the first pilot.

What the assessment should deliver

• A short report: findings by track, with evidence.
• As-is process maps and the loss tree.
• A prioritised opportunity list with value ranges.
• A baseline for the metrics you will improve, with owners and data sources.
• A phased roadmap and budget range for the first steps.

An interview guide you can reuse

Consistency across interviews is what lets patterns emerge. We use the same short guide with everyone, adjusting the language to the person’s role.

• Walk me through a normal day. Where do you spend the most time?
• What do you check twice because you do not trust the first answer?
• What do you keep in a notebook, Excel or WhatsApp rather than in the system?
• When something goes wrong, how do you find out — and how late?
• If you could fix one thing tomorrow, what would it be?

Reading the data you collect

Data review in an assessment is not about building dashboards. It is about judging whether the numbers can be trusted enough to base decisions on. For each important data set, check completeness (are entries missing?), timeliness (when were they entered compared with when the event happened?), consistency (do the same items have the same codes across plants?) and plausibility (do quantities add up across stages?).

Where data fails these checks, note it as a finding in its own right. Very often, the first improvement project is not a new feature — it is simply capturing the right data at the right moment.

Presenting findings so they lead to action

End the assessment with a working session, not a presentation. Walk leadership through the evidence for each finding — photos, quotes, numbers — and let them challenge it. Agree the top opportunities in the room, name an owner for each, and set the date for the first pilot decision. An assessment that ends with a decision is worth far more than a thick report that ends on a shelf.

Common mistakes

• Only interviewing managers.
• Only visiting during the day shift.
• Jumping to software features before agreeing the problem.
• Estimating value without a baseline.
• Producing a long report that nobody owns afterwards.