For years, one machine dominated my downtime report. Not because it was old, or exotic, or particularly complicated... it dispensed a single component into the product. The machine's job was to cut this component from a web and drop it into the product. That's all it did. But it produced two failure modes which appeared on the daily report almost every day: it would cut the component in the wrong spot, or the line would have been down and this machine's name would be listed

Walk any plant floor eighteen months after a new SOP rollout and you'll find the same story: the binder is still on the shelf, the laminated job aid is still on the wall, and nobody follows either one anymore. Leadership calls it a discipline problem. Retrain, write someone up, rework some bad product, deal with the personnel fallout, explain it up the chain, move on. But it isn't a discipline problem. It's really not even willful. The workers are departing from expectation

Processes don't fail because people ignore them. They fail because people follow them for a while, and then a little less, and then only when it's convenient. This is process decay, and it isn't a discipline problem. It's a predictable, mechanical outcome of how habits and procedures interact. And it's 100% preventable. The stabilizing force that only stabilizes some of the process Habits are what make a process survivable in the real world. Once a step becomes automatic, a p