Reliability Crime Lab Field Guide

Do You Know Where Your 24 Hours Go?

Every manufacturing facility has the same 24 hours.

So why do some plants consistently outperform others?

The answer usually isn’t harder work.

It’s understanding where the day actually went.

Most organizations measure downtime, scrap, and production. Few understand the hidden factory:

• Waiting for maintenance
• Repeated machine resets
• Micro-stops
• Quality holds
• Informal workarounds
• Speed losses
• Lost opportunities that never make it into a report

Those hidden losses quietly steal capacity every single shift.

That’s why I wrote the Reliability Crime Lab Field Guide: Do You Know Where Your 24 Hours Go?

This isn’t another textbook.

It’s a practical field guide filled with investigations, plant-floor activities, real manufacturing examples, chapter challenges, action tables, and exercises designed to help teams:

• Make the operating day visible
• Build a 24-hour operational timeline
• Separate Value-Added, Business Value-Added, and Non-Value-Added work
• Expose the Hidden Factory
• Prioritize the losses that matter most
• Connect OEE, Reliability, and Continuous Improvement into one practical system

Whether you’re an operator, technician, engineer, supervisor, maintenance manager, reliability professional, or continuous improvement leader, the goal is the same:

Stop guessing. Start investigating.

Because you can’t improve what you can’t see.

This book answers the following questions:

• The report says we lost production… now what?
• Where do I even start looking?
• Why doesn’t OEE explain what happened?
• The operators know something. How do I capture it?
• We have twenty opportunities. Which one should we investigate first?
• We fixed it… how do we make sure it doesn’t come back?

Most manufacturing books teach tools. This field guide teaches what to do next.

When the production report doesn’t tell the whole story… when OEE raises more questions than answers… when the Hidden Factory is consuming your operating day… this guide gives you a practical investigation process you can use immediately to uncover the missing minutes, prioritize the right opportunities, and prevent repeat offenders.

If you’ve ever looked at yesterday’s production report and wondered, “Where did the day actually go?” this book was written for you.