How to check if your production manager is overworked
Most owners of companies around Lodz and Zgierz find out about their production manager's overload only when they lay a resignation on the table or land on sick leave. At Solvium Strategia Sp. z o.o., we analyzed the work of 43 managers in 2023 and the results are alarming. A manager who runs with a wrench or looks for pallets in the warehouse himself is not managing your profit, he's just putting out fires.
Phone ringing every 4 minutes? That's not work, that's paralysis
During an audit at a metal processing plant in Pabianice in September 2024, we measured that the shift manager was interrupted an average of 87 times in eight hours. Each such interruption is not just a minute of conversation, but a real 6-8 minutes returning to full focus on the schedule. If your leader has to personally decide where to put a defective part or who to issue a new pair of work gloves, it means your processes are failing. We count every zloty, and an experienced manager's hourly rate costs you too much to waste on tasks that a simple system or workstation instruction should handle.
We often hear from owners that 'that's just how it is here.' This is a mistake that costs an average of 4,230 PLN per month in lost efficiency of one leader alone. When a manager becomes a bottleneck, the whole line slows down by about 14.6% per week. Workers wait for a decision instead of assembling. Instead of looking for blame in people, look at how many times your manager had to leave his desk to show someone how to fill out a simple Excel form. That's not management; it's being the most expensive operator in your company.
A manager who puts out fires at a machine doesn't have time to check why those fires break out in the first place.
Reports written at 9:14 PM are a sign the system failed
We analyzed ERP system logins for 12 of our furniture industry clients in the last quarter. On average, managers spend 3.2 hours a week 'typing data' after hours, sitting at the kitchen table at home. This is a direct path to burnout and errors in material orders, which in 2023 cost one company near Lodz nearly 18,400 PLN in excess inventory alone. If your employee cannot close the daily report in 15 minutes before the end of a shift, it means you have too much manual retyping of papers into the computer.
Facts on the table: a healthy process allows for preparing the plan for the next day in a maximum of 24 minutes. If it takes your manager two hours, it means he is fighting tools, not production. At Solvium Strategia Sp. z o.o., we implemented solutions that shortened reporting time from 74 minutes to less than 11 minutes. This gives your person time to actually watch quality and energy costs on the hall, which is key for margin survival at current electricity prices.
5-question test: Is your leader still in control?
Ask your production manager these five questions tomorrow at 10:00 AM. Don't let him look at the computer. 1. What is today's scrap cost on the third line? 2. Who in the crew has the lowest efficiency this week? 3. At what time exactly will we finish the order for client X? 4. How many free pallet spaces do we have for semi-finished goods? 5. What is today's OEE for the most important machine? If he answers 'I have to check that in the tables' to at least three questions, it means he's not managing the process; he's its slave.
A true production leader should have this data in sight or on a simple management dashboard. Lack of an immediate answer means your employee's time is consumed by unnecessary information searching. In one window-making plant, after organizing the information flow, the time needed to answer such questions dropped from 2 hours (collecting data from foremen) to 47 seconds. No fluff about visions – these are real minutes turning into spare capacity for your factory.
If answering a simple question about production status takes more than 2 minutes, your process is blind.
How to reclaim 6.2 hours per week for your leader
Fixing this situation doesn't require buying expensive machines for millions. Often, a change in how information flows from the floor to the office is enough. Implementing simple shadow boards, standardizing changeovers, and eliminating unnecessary meetings (which last 14 minutes too long) can work wonders. At Solvium Strategia Sp. z o.o., we don't believe in magic, we believe in numbers. We reclaimed an average of 6.2 hours per week for each manager we worked with in the first half of 2024. That's almost a full working day of profit without hiring a new person.
Perhaps you fear that changes will cause resistance. That's natural. However, our clients see that after introducing clear rules, managers' stress levels drop by 34.7% within the first two months. People stop quitting because they finally know what they are responsible for and have the tools to control it. Instead of looking for a new manager and paying a commission to an HR agency, invest in an audit of what you already have. It's the fastest way to stable production that doesn't depend on the mood of one overworked human.
