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  <title><![CDATA[Factory Fulcrum]]></title>
  <link>https://factoryfulcrum.com/</link>
  <description><![CDATA[Factory Fulcrum is a São Paulo-based industrial operations consultancy. Diagnostic sprints, process redesign, and leadership alignment for mid-size manufacturers in Brazil.]]></description>
  <language>en</language>
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    <title><![CDATA[Why the bottleneck is almost never where you think it is]]></title>
    <link>https://factoryfulcrum.com/</link>
    <description><![CDATA[In most of the factories we visit, the loudest problem and the actual constraint are two different things. The loud problem gets the attention. The constraint keeps costing money. Here is how to tell them apart.]]></description>
    <pubDate>2026-06-10</pubDate>
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    <title><![CDATA[The handover problem: what gets lost between shifts]]></title>
    <link>https://factoryfulcrum.com/</link>
    <description><![CDATA[Quality defects that spike in the first two hours of a new shift are almost always a handover problem, not an operator problem. The information that the outgoing shift holds in their heads does not make it to the incoming shift. Here is a simple fix.]]></description>
    <pubDate>2026-04-22</pubDate>
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    <title><![CDATA[On-time delivery fell 23 points in two years. The scheduling system had not changed.]]></title>
    <link>https://factoryfulcrum.com/</link>
    <description><![CDATA[A furniture manufacturer in Bento Gonçalves watched their on-time delivery rate fall from 87 to 64 percent as their product range expanded. The scheduling logic was the same as it had always been. That was the problem.]]></description>
    <pubDate>2026-02-14</pubDate>
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    <title><![CDATA[How to read a maintenance log before calling a consultant]]></title>
    <link>https://factoryfulcrum.com/notes/how-to-read-maintenance-log.html</link>
    <guid>https://factoryfulcrum.com/notes/how-to-read-maintenance-log.html</guid>
    <description><![CDATA[There is a peculiar irony at the heart of industrial maintenance: the factories most likely to call a consultant in a panic are often the same ones sitting on months — sometimes years — of extraordinarily detailed stoppage records that nobody has properly read. The data exists. It was entered, shift by shift, by technicians who knew exactly what broke and roughly why. It sits in a CMMS, or a shared spreadsheet, or a folder of printed-and-scanned sheets in a grey filing cabinet near the compressor room. Before you spend a day-rate on an outside eye, it is worth spending an afternoon on what your own people already wrote down. This guide is about how to do that — not as an exercise in data science, but as an act of careful reading, the kind a good editor brings to a manuscript or a good detective brings to a witness statement. The goal is not a dashboard. The goal is three or four sentences you can say out loud with confidence: here is what is actually happening, here is when it happens, here is what we have already tried.]]></description>
    <pubDate>2025-10-05</pubDate>
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    <title><![CDATA[The five scheduling assumptions that break when your product range doubles]]></title>
    <link>https://factoryfulcrum.com/notes/scheduling-assumptions-product-range.html</link>
    <guid>https://factoryfulcrum.com/notes/scheduling-assumptions-product-range.html</guid>
    <description><![CDATA[There is a particular kind of calm that settles over a production floor that has found its rhythm. The changeovers happen in a familiar sequence, the machine operators know without being told which job follows which, and the planner's spreadsheet — or the MRP screen behind it — hums along matching demand to capacity with something approaching grace. Then the sales team lands a new product range. Then another. And the calm, without any single dramatic event to mark its passing, is gone. This article is about what happens in that interval — the period after the SKU count doubles but before anyone has admitted that the scheduling logic built for the old range is no longer fit for purpose. It names five specific assumptions that break, describes what breaking looks like on the shop floor, and offers concrete ways to catch each failure mode before it shows up in a late-delivery report.]]></description>
    <pubDate>2026-05-04</pubDate>
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    <title><![CDATA[What a good shift handover actually contains]]></title>
    <link>https://factoryfulcrum.com/notes/good-shift-handover-contents.html</link>
    <guid>https://factoryfulcrum.com/notes/good-shift-handover-contents.html</guid>
    <description><![CDATA[There is a moment, somewhere around the forty-fifth minute of a new shift, when a supervisor stops walking and stares at a machine that should not be running the way it is running. Nobody told him. The outgoing shift knew — they had been nursing it for three hours — but the telling got lost in the noise of a busy changeover, a quick joke by the clock-out terminal, a foreman who was already thinking about the drive home. That moment of staring, of not knowing, is not a communication failure in any dramatic sense. It is quieter than that, and far more expensive. This article is about what a good shift handover actually contains: the specific categories of information, the reasons a verbal account of even the most conscientious outgoing team reliably drops critical details, and the practical shape of a written format that changes — measurably, perceptibly — how a new crew spends its first two hours on the floor.]]></description>
    <pubDate>2025-07-14</pubDate>
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    <title><![CDATA[Die changeover sequencing: why the old logic stops working]]></title>
    <link>https://factoryfulcrum.com/notes/die-changeover-sequencing-logic.html</link>
    <guid>https://factoryfulcrum.com/notes/die-changeover-sequencing-logic.html</guid>
    <description><![CDATA[There is a particular kind of institutional knowledge that sits in a press room like furniture — heavy, familiar, and seldom questioned. The changeover sequence is almost always one of those pieces. Someone, years ago, decided the order in which dies would be swapped, and that decision calcified into procedure, then into habit, then into the unspoken assumption that this is simply how things are done. The problem is that your product mix in 2024 almost certainly bears no resemblance to the mix that existed when that sequence was written. Customer orders have changed, batch sizes have shrunk, new part families have been added, and yet the sequence has stayed fixed — a solution designed for a world that no longer exists. This article is for the press room manager or operations lead who suspects something is wrong but hasn't had a clear framework for diagnosing it. What follows is a structured way to audit your current changeover sequence against your actual demand, and a concrete picture of what a revised logic should look like.]]></description>
    <pubDate>2025-03-04</pubDate>
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    <title><![CDATA[How to run a one-day operational alignment session with your management team]]></title>
    <link>https://factoryfulcrum.com/notes/operational-alignment-session-guide.html</link>
    <guid>https://factoryfulcrum.com/notes/operational-alignment-session-guide.html</guid>
    <description><![CDATA[There is a particular kind of silence that falls over a conference room when a senior manager finally says, out loud, what everyone in the building has quietly known for months. It is not a comfortable silence. It is the silence of people recalibrating — deciding, in real time, whether to defend their position or let it go. That moment, uncomfortable as it is, is exactly what a Leadership Alignment Workshop is designed to produce. At Factory Fulcrum, we have spent years refining the conditions that make that moment possible: the right preparation, the right data on the table, and a format that structures conversation without suffocating it. This article is a behind-the-scenes account of how we do it — the weeks before, the hours of the day itself, and the specific mechanisms that tend to turn a room of well-meaning but misaligned managers into a team that agrees, at minimum, on what problem they are actually trying to solve.]]></description>
    <pubDate>2025-11-26</pubDate>
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