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Finding your losses: the 5-box framework that beats a Pareto chart
A 15-minute exercise that gets you closer to the real number than a week of analytics — and a working tool that fixes it.
Most sites I’ve walked into have a Pareto chart on the wall. Most of them are wrong — not because the maths is wrong, but because the categories are the ones that came pre-loaded with the MES. The site has been categorising the same losses the same way for so long that the chart only ever surfaces the ones it knew about when the dashboard was set up.
The 5-box framework was the first thing I’d put on the wall instead. Five boxes, hand-drawn on flipchart paper, in the war-room corner of the canteen.
The five boxes
- Availability — the line wasn’t running when it should have been
- Performance — the line was running, but slower than it could have
- Quality — the line was running, but making something the customer rejects
- Changeover — the line was being switched between products
- Yield — the line was producing, but losing material somewhere between input and pack
The 15-minute exercise
Sit a shift team in front of the boxes. Don’t pre-fill anything. Ask: “If I’d given you a free week to fix one of these, which one is bleeding the most money this quarter?”
Then ask the same question to the next shift. Then the night shift. Then the warehouse team. You’ll get five answers. Two of them will be the same. Those are your real top losses.
Why this works when a Pareto doesn’t
The MES captures what it knows how to capture. The operators know what they see. The gap between those two is where the money is. A Pareto chart from data only shows you what’s been measured. The 5-box exercise shows you what hasn’t been.
The companion tool — the 5-Box Loss Diagnostic — takes this further: a 15-question structured walkthrough that scores each box, estimates the £/year impact, and points you at the lean tool that fixes each one. Free, three minutes, branded PDF report.
What to do next
Once you’ve named the losses, you need a cadence to chase them. That’s what the £97 Toolkit handles next — the FI Wave Planner tab takes the top loss and turns it into a 12-week working plan.
Or skip ahead and run the full site through the Cadence Six assessment — it scores you across all six axes, not just loss visibility.
The pattern doesn’t change. Find the loss, run the cadence, close the loop.