Production board on a shop TV
The single change with the biggest impact on shop-floor culture. What to display, what to hide, where to mount it.
Wall-mount one TV. Point it at /workspace/floor-board. Don't touch it again. The shop will run better.
Why it works
Shop floors run on shared awareness. When the staff member packing tomorrow's order can see that today's order is on the press, they pack differently. When the press operator knows three orders are due Friday, they sequence differently. A TV makes that visible to everyone, all the time, without anyone having to ask.
What to show
The floor board shows four columns: Artwork, Print queue, On the press, QC + pack. Each card shows the order number, the customer, the unit count, the due date, and a red border if it's late. The "On the press" column has a pulsing dot so you can spot the live job at a glance.
What not to show
Don't put dollar values on the floor. Don't put customer phone numbers on the floor. The floor needs job-shape info: who, what, how many, when. Money lives in the office, customer details live in the order.
Where to mount it
Eye level for someone standing at the press, not sitting at a desk. Ideally on a wall the press operator looks at while they're loading shirts. A 50-inch IPS panel does the job; we've seen shops repurpose conference room TVs that were collecting dust.
How to power it
An old iPad mini in landscape mode works. A Fire TV Stick + cheap monitor works. A Raspberry Pi running Chromium kiosk mode works. Whatever you have. The page auto-refreshes every 60 seconds and shows a live clock so nothing goes stale.
One shop owner told us they put the TV up on a Tuesday. By Friday a regular argument they used to have ("did anyone see that order from Northside?") had simply stopped happening. They didn't tell anyone they'd installed a system. They just put up a TV.
One more board: the operator station
If you have separate printer / packer / QC stations, give each their own tablet with /workspace/operator/{role}. Same data, filtered to the stages they care about. Printers see Print Queue + On the press. Packers see QC + pack. QC sees production + QC + pack. Each station only loads what's theirs.