About Wade Prescott

I've spent my working life around manufacturing floors. Not in a corner office reading reports about them, on them. Watching changeovers run long, watching a good operator quietly fix a process the official paperwork got wrong, watching a brilliant plan die because nobody wrote down how to actually do it. That's the view this whole site is written from.

Somewhere along the way I figured out that the systems that work in a real plant look nothing like the ones in the textbooks. The textbook version is clean, expensive, and assumes you have a budget, a staff, and a quiet room to think in. The real version gets built on a whiteboard during second shift by a supervisor who got promoted three weeks ago and is figuring it out as they go. I write for that supervisor.

Who I write for

You ran a machine, you were good at it, and they handed you a clipboard and a team and told you to "own the line." Now you're supposed to write SOPs, run a daily huddle, hold a 1:1, onboard a new hire, and somehow also keep the floor moving. Nobody gave you a playbook. There wasn't one.

I write the playbook I wish that person had. Plain language, no jargon, no theory you have to translate before you can use it. If a method needs a consultant and a six-month rollout, it's no good to you on Tuesday. I care about what works on Tuesday.

What I believe about systems

A few things I've come to hold pretty firmly:

• Practical beats theatrical. A messy system people actually follow beats a beautiful one that lives in a binder nobody opens.
• You don't need software to get organized. Most plant problems get solved with a shared drive, a clear owner, and the discipline to keep things current. Buy the tool later, once you know what you're doing by hand.
• Build it on a whiteboard if you have to. The point is the thinking, not the polish.
• The operator is the final judge. If the person doing the work can't follow your document or your meeting, it failed, and the failure is yours, not theirs.

I'm opinionated about all of it because I've watched the alternatives waste a lot of good people's time.

The work

The proof of any of this is the work itself. I've written a set of field guides for supervisors, plant managers, quality managers, and operations leaders at small and midsize manufacturers, the shops running anywhere from a couple dozen people to a few hundred. They cover the stuff that actually fills a supervisor's week: SOPs and standard work, 5S and visual management, daily huddles and tier meetings, 1:1s and performance reviews, onboarding, document control, CAPA, FMEA, and value stream mapping.

Each one is meant to be picked up, used, and put back down with something fixed. Not read cover to cover and shelved. You can see the whole set on the books page.

If you want the shorter version on a regular basis, I write up what I'm seeing and what's working in the field notes list below. Same voice, same bias toward what you can use this week. Come on in.