The scoreboard
Ridgeline Instruments · Plant Score
Electronics manufacturer — two SMT lines, four assembly cells, three shifts, fourteen critical machines. The flagship is the Horizon industrial printer line. Scored on a half-day facilitated walkthrough plus one completed 30-day sprint.
Every value on this page carries a tag: how we know it. measured assessed self-reported not yet measured
The four pillars
See it. Trace it. Adopt it. Retain it.
Twelve components, each scored by a written rubric an engineer can audit — graded questions, timed exercises, and evidence pulled on the floor. Nothing here is a survey answer wearing a score costume: if we didn't see it, it says so.
The escalation board
Red or green. On track or not.
Every critical finding goes on the board and gets a lane, an owner, and a day counter — the way a plant actually manages a problem. The four steps are the same STAR loop: See it (make it visible) → Trace it (root cause) → Adopt it (standardize the fix) → Retain it (prove it holds). Management reads it in ten seconds.
An escalation leaves the board one way: RETAIN verified — the fix held, in control, with the receipts. Not when the meeting ends. When the process proves it. ESC-03 above just earned its exit at this week's review.
The mirror
“About 80.”
At the walkthrough, three people wrote down what they believed Line 4 runs at. The cards were locked before anyone measured anything. Thirty days of real machine data later:
“Your effectiveness is 54 — and your Plant Score went up when you measured it.”
The score rewards seeing, not pretty results. It can only go up by installing sight, trace, adoption, and retention — never by hiding a bad number. That's the whole point.
How a score hardens
Testimony → assessment → measurement
The same plant, three stages. A phone call earns a band. A walkthrough earns a number. A sprint replaces belief with 30 days of machine data — one pillar at a time.
Grading testimony cost a band — measuring won it back. The score moves only when knowledge does.
The math
Your engineer is welcome to audit this.
One formula, printed weights, no black box. Every component score traces to a written rubric, a timed exercise, or 30 days of machine data — and the whole thing recomputes by hand from the signed worksheet.
PlantScore = round( Σ(component × weight) ÷ Σ weights ) over SCORED components only pillar_score = same formula, over that pillar's SCORED components This plant: 4,155 ÷ 95 = 43.7 → 44 (one component unmeasured → its weight 5 leaves the math)
Weights — equal by design in v1
Each pillar carries 25 of 100. We have no field evidence yet that one pillar predicts more than another — so we refuse to pretend we do. Weights are versioned; when the evidence exists, the version changes and every re-score says so.
weights: estar-2026-07-w1 · bands: estar-2026-07-b1 · definition: estar_v1
The bands
Iron rules
- People write the rubrics; the rubrics own the numbers. AI never invents or inflates one.
- Unmeasured leaves the math. Never zero, never a default.
- Every value says how we know it — and self-reported never outranks measured.
- It scores the operating system, never the results — so honesty is always the winning move.
Want your real number?
Half a day on your floor. Twenty-two questions with written grading anchors, four exercises your own people run, and a signed read-back before we leave. One fixed price, put in writing before you say yes. Scored by hand, on paper you keep. Your data never leaves your building — we walk out with derived scores and finding titles, never your files, your photos, or your data.
Ask about a baseline walkthroughOr just email john@bluestarcentral.com. And if you want to see where the clean data behind the SEE pillar comes from, read Case File 01: The Daily Audit Problem.