DeepHow Confidential — prepared for Lear

Lear · Body 2 · 31XX-2 · measured 25 August 2026 · 18:00–20:00 UTC

Work content,
board by board

The bar chart on the work-content page shows each station's average and says the problem is the spread. This is the spread. Same measurement, same twelve stations — cut into the 40 board cycles the two hours actually contain, instead of averaged flat.

Every station, every board

person-minutes of hands-on work · one cell = one board cycle (179 s)

18:00 UTC — first hour
19:00 UTC — second hour
less work more work  cycle exceeds 5.97 p-min ▨ no data
What the eye should catch first. B2C5 runs hot through the first hour — including the single heaviest cycle measured anywhere on the line, 9.70 p-min — and then goes cold for the whole second hour. B2C8 does the same, less sharply. Those two stations account for 89% of the line's entire second-hour drop; the other nine are flat. That is a staffing event at two stations, not the line slowing down.

The spread, not the average

box = p10–p90 of cycles · line = full range · dot = station average · 5.97 = a crew of two at the 179 s pitch

This is the drop-in change. The existing chart plots the black dot alone. Adding the box and the range says the thing the page already asserts in prose: B2C14's average of 5.53 sits just under the 5.97 line, but its cycles run to 7.96 — it is over capacity on a large minority of boards. B2C5 swings 8.3× between its quietest and busiest cycle.

As it happens

each station's own trace · horizontal rule = 5.97 p-min · shaded = second hour

What this measurement can and cannot carry

stated plainly, so the numbers are used for what they support

How to improve the measurement

four changes, in the order they would pay back

  1. Point the cameras over the operators' shoulders, with the whole board in view. Today they look across the line, so an operator's own body hides the part of the board being worked on and the measurement has to infer hands-down posture rather than see the hands. Framing from behind, with the full board in frame, would let it see what the hands are on — and would remove the largest single source of missed work, which is an operator standing between the camera and the board. This is the change that would move the r = −0.85 above closer to zero, and it is worth doing first.
  2. Map each station as its own shape, not as a rectangle. A station is a curved run of conveyor seen through a wide-angle lens; a rectangle is neither. Every region here is a box with its bottom extended to the frame edge, and it shows: on some cameras 10–33% of the engaged work in frame falls outside the region, while others admit the neighbouring station's operators. A polygon drawn on the work area — or better, a mapping from each camera onto the line's own floor plan — would let a region follow the station instead of approximating it, and would let the same operator be attributed correctly wherever they stand.
  3. Close the gaps between stations. A board is visible inside one camera for 30–60 s against a 120 s station-to-station transit, so the fields of view do not meet. An operator working in the space between two cameras is counted by neither — which is exactly where a chasing operator goes. Two stations, B2C9 and B2C16, have no camera at all, breaking the line into three segments and limiting how far any flow conclusion can travel. Overlapping the views slightly would cost nothing and close both holes.
  4. Run one resolution across the line. Four of the twelve cameras record at 640×480 and seven at 2592×1944. The board placards decode reliably on the high-resolution cameras and not at all on the low ones, so board identity and true per-board timing are available on part of the line only — which is why the cycles on this page are fixed 180-second windows rather than real board arrivals. Matching the resolution would make per-board measurement possible everywhere.
None of these need line time. Three are camera placement and one is configuration. The measurement itself does not change — the same signals get read from a view that supports them, which is what turns a study into a number you can run a line on.
DeepHow Confidential · prepared for Lear · contains Lear operational data