Owners of machine-building units read the order book weekly and the bank balance daily. People trouble reaches them later. It lands as a resignation letter from the only engineer who understands the servo tuning, or as a dry-cycle trial that slipped because the senior wireman was on leave. By then every fix is costly.
A short monthly review moves that moment earlier. It asks the same ten questions each time, so a drift shows up across three or four sittings. The list below fits the builders grouped on our industrial machinery and equipment page, from one-off automation shops to pump, blender, agitator and compressor plants.
The ten questions
Header: month, who attended, and last month's three actions with status.
1. Which modules on the floor, such as a servo indexer or a PLC program only one person can back up, hang on a single head, and is that list longer than last month?
2. How many outstation days did each service or commissioning engineer log, and who has gone longest without a home week?
3. Which bay booked the most overtime, and did it appear on the load chart or arrive unannounced?
4. Which fitters, welders or wiremen are waiting for a grade test, and since which date?
5. Which vacancies are open, oldest first, and what is blocking each?
6. Who resigned or was let go, and what reason reached the person who sat with them?
7. Which rework tags, trial-log faults or snag-list items from customer acceptance point to a skill gap?
8. Which near misses were written in the crane bay, the weld bay or a site diary, and who closed each one?
9. Are lodging, halting and travel claims settled, or is any engineer still waiting?
10. Which promise to an employee, such as a re-test, a training slot or a transfer, has gone past its date?
Actions: three at most, each with a named doer and a deadline.What each question is really testing
- Questions 1 and 4: skill depth. A lengthening one-person list alongside a queue of untested fitters means the shop is learning slower than sales are booking.
- Questions 2 and 9: the road. Engineers living out of lodges with claims unpaid are the likeliest to resign with no warning.
- Question 3: planning. Overtime that keeps surprising the plant head means the load chart is missing or ignored.
- Questions 5 and 6: the gate. A stale vacancy for a TIG welder or PLC technician and exits from the same bay usually share a cause.
- Question 7: quality meets people. Training then follows real faults, such as a misaligned coupling or a leaking manifold, rather than a calendar.
- Question 8: safety in plain sight. A heavy fabrication bay reporting no near misses for a month usually means nobody is writing them down.
- Question 10: trust. People forgive a refusal. A promise that quietly vanishes is remembered for years.
Running the review
- 1
Fix the date for the year
Pick one week in the month, after salaries and before the dispatch rush. Block it in every diary for the year.
- 2
Prepare one sheet two days ahead
Pull outstation days from the service call register, overtime from attendance, faults from the trial log, claims from accounts. Put last month's figure beside this month's.
- 3
Limit the chairs
Owner, plant head, service head and HR around one table. Call in the design head when question 1 or 7 points at drawings, BOM errors or late revisions.
- 4
Move fast through quiet questions
An unchanged answer gets one line. Spend the minutes where the numbers moved.
- 5
Close with three actions
Each names a person and a date. A list of eight produces nothing.
- 6
Open next month by reading them back
Done, late or dropped, said aloud before question 1.
Most figures already exist: biometric punches, the claims file, snag lists, the service call register. Collecting them onto one page is the groundwork of HR reporting and analytics. The packaging machinery makers' reporting page shows one kind of builder tracking travel days beside repeat faults.
How the review usually fails
- It drifts into a production meeting about gearbox shortages and crate dates, and the people questions get squeezed into the final minutes.
- Figures turn up on the day, so the hour goes on arguing over biometric punches and job-card hours.
- Actions carry no names, and each person assumes another took them.
- The questions are reworded every month, so nothing can be compared.
- Exit reasons are logged as 'personal', which buries the pattern question 6 exists to catch.
Where the answers lead
Red on questions 1 and 3 across several sittings signals a planning gap, covered in balancing workload across long build cycles. Exits piling up under question 6 call for a closer look at reasons, as set out in why people leave machinery makers. Questions 2 and 9 together are the subject of our post on engineers who live on the road.
