The first article is a guest, not the week

A wire-harness plant in Navanakorn keeps beautiful first-article sheets. The piece is made slowly, the crimp height is written to two decimals, and a supervisor signs in a pen that still has ink. Customers like the sheet. Directors like it even more, because it is one page.

What the guest does not see

The first article is a guest. It arrives before the line is tired, often with the engineer's hand still on the tool. The Thursday crimp die that was swapped after a jam does not appear on that page. Neither does the operator who covers two benches at 2 a.m. and checks every tenth piece instead of every piece.

When a customer complaint landed on a pulled strand, the plant's first reply was the first-article sheet from the start of the lot. The heights on that sheet were inside the window. The complaint was about a different hour of the same lot. Sending the guest's portrait as if it were the household only stretched the argument.

What belongs in the briefing instead

Keep the first article. It tells you the tool can make a good piece. Beside it, put the ordinary sheet: the checks written during the run, including the gaps where a check was skipped. If a tool was changed, the time of the change belongs on the same page as the readings that follow it.

In the capability briefing we refuse to treat a first article as the spread of the week. One careful piece has no spread. If the only numbers you have are from that piece, the honest sentence is short: the line has not yet shown its ordinary hour.