SNB Production WorkflowGuideDesign Queue
Design Queue
What design is holding up, and the one number nobody in the factory can move.
The Design Queue is a manager’s board. It exists to answer one question: what is waiting, and how long has it been waiting?
1The board
Go to Design Queue.
The line across the top is the board’s whole argument:
The longest a design has been with a customer is 14 days. Nobody in the factory can move that one.
Work is grouped into columns — Waiting to start first, with a count.
That first column lists requests that have never been sent to a designer. A job whose design the customer has already approved is finished, not waiting, and it does not come back here.
Each card carries the request number, the job, the customer, how long it has been waiting, and sometimes a money note such as “Unpaid — Nothing has been invoiced yet.”
Two actions sit on every card: Assign Designer and Open the request.
The heading distinguishes between two kinds of delay, and it is the distinction managers most often miss.
Work waiting for a designer is a staffing problem — assign somebody. Work waiting with a customer is not: no amount of pressure inside the building moves it. Reading the board without that distinction produces pressure applied to the wrong people.
What happens next
Assign Designer from here does the same thing as assigning from an inspection: it puts the job in a designer’s hands and takes it off the waiting column.