Stop Robbing Peter

You covered the hot job. You took the part, the person, or the hour from the job that was not yelling. Peter pays on Thursday, when that job is now the fire.

Here is how it usually goes. Say a customer calls Monday and their order jumps the line. You are short one bracket, so you pull it from a kit staged for an order due Thursday. You pull the operator who was building that kit, too. Monday’s order ships. Everybody feels good. Nobody writes anything down, because it worked.

Thursday morning, somebody opens the kit. The bracket is gone. The operator is on something else. Now Thursday’s order is the hot job, and the only place to find help is the next job that is not yelling. You did not solve a problem on Monday. You started a chain.

The robbing is not the failure. Sometimes it is the right call. The failure is that the move was invisible. The hot job had a crowd watching it. The robbed job had nobody. So the cost landed on a day and a person who never saw it coming.

That is why the fix is a line on the board, not a speech about priorities. Name the job you robbed. Write what you took. Put an owner next to it and a time the part, the person, or the hour comes back. Three things change when you do that. The cost is in plain sight, so the next person who wants to rob that same job has to look at it first. Somebody owns getting it back, so it does not depend on whoever happens to remember. And the time warns you early, on Tuesday instead of Thursday, when the payback is not going to happen.

If you cannot write a time it comes back, you did not cover a gap. You moved it, and you hid the move inside a win.

This week, before you call any rescue done, write the robbed job on the board with an owner and a time.