Standards are in place — procedures, approval chains, quality checks. But execution varies by shift, by manager, by who's asking. When something goes wrong, nobody can explain how the call got made.
"We have a quality process that everyone says they follow. But every shift runs it differently. I don't know if we have a training problem, a management problem, or something else."
— VP Operations, Tier 2 Automotive SupplierUsually it's neither. The written process and the real process have quietly diverged — and different people learned different versions. The gap grows until something breaks.
Written procedures and actual practice are rarely the same thing. Over time — through shift changes, new hires, workarounds that have become habits — real work drifts from official work. Nobody decided this would happen. It just did.
The fix isn't more documentation or retraining. It's closing the gap between what leadership thinks is happening and what's real — then building shared standards that people helped create and that leaders reinforce consistently enough to hold.
Every situation looks different up close. What's described here is the pattern — what I find on your floor may confirm it, complicate it, or point somewhere else. I don't arrive with a fixed answer. I arrive with a method for finding the real one.
A 30-minute conversation is usually enough to identify where to start.