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 workmore 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
The fluctuation is real, not sampling noise. Engagement is sampled every 15 s,
so a cycle holds only 12 samples and some spread is inevitable. Shuffling each station's samples in
time gives the noise floor: 56–87% of the observed cycle-to-cycle spread survives it,
varying by station. The traces are signal.
The 5.97 line is confirmed. Lear has verified that every station is crewed with two
operators, so the capacity line is 2 × 179 s ÷ 60 = 5.97 person-minutes per board — measured, not assumed.
That also makes total work content the right basis for comparing stations.
What the cameras see varies, and it tracks the result. Because the crew is known to be
two everywhere, measured presence is no longer a headcount — it is occupancy, the share of expected
operator-time the camera actually saw. It ranges from 44% at B2C12 to over 100% at B2C14
and B2C17, where the region also admits people who are not that station's operators. Across the twelve
stations, unseen operator-time and measured work content correlate at r = −0.85.
Some of that is real — a station whose operators leave to chase boards is genuinely doing less work in
front of its camera. But it means a station reading light cannot yet be separated from a station
being watched poorly, and B2C12, the lightest on this chart, is also the least observed. The
section below is what closes that gap.
Cycle boundaries are approximate. Cells are fixed 180 s windows from the clip
start, against a true pitch of 179 s — they are not phase-locked to real board arrivals, and drift
about one cycle-width across the two hours. Fine for "how much did this station swing", wrong for
"which board was heavy".
Two stations are short. B2C14 has no second-hour clip (18 of 40 cycles) and
B2C7's first-hour clip ends early (29 of 40). Missing cycles are hatched, never zero-filled.
B2C11's camera views a walkway rather than its work area, so its numbers are
flagged throughout the study. It is shown here for completeness, not for use.
How to improve the measurement
four changes, in the order they would pay back
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.
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.
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.
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