🪜 Pairs with the Cadence Standard methodology — DMS is the daily tier; Programme Cadence is the quarterly. (Cadence Standard is not sold separately. This pack stands alone — sequencing is just a hint for buyers who later go deeper.)

The whiteboard before the £20k SaaS. A working Lean Daily Management System — three tiers of huddle, one metrics framework, one confirmation-walk discipline. Built by an ops practitioner, not a software vendor.

💡 What is DMS?

A Daily Management System is the operating rhythm that keeps a shop floor or operations site self-correcting. Three short, structured huddles per day — Tier 1 at the shift face, Tier 2 in daily ops, Tier 3 in weekly business review — each escalating what it can't resolve. Metrics tracked under SQDCP-I (Safety / Quality / Delivery / Cost / People / Improvement). Manager confirmation walks verify what the data says. Public-domain Lean methodology (Toyota visual management, Mann's Creating a Lean Culture, Shingo Institute), not a vendor's proprietary playbook.

When DMS works

• You have physical operations — warehouse, depot, manufacturing line, kitchen, hospital ward, contact-centre floor — where work happens in shifts and visibility matters.
• You have clear, daily-measurable KPIs (pick accuracy, on-time despatch, first-pass yield, safety near-misses).
• Leadership is willing to walk the floor every day and ask what the board says. DMS without confirmation walks is just a wall of paper.

When DMS does NOT work

• Pure knowledge-work teams with no daily output rhythm (design studios, R&D, deep-strategy units). Use weekly retros, not daily huddles.
• Sites where leadership won't or can't show up to confirm — the discipline collapses inside three weeks.
• Organisations that confuse DMS with stand-ups. A stand-up reports status; DMS escalates problems and triggers action by close of shift.

The "before you buy the SaaS" framing

Solvace, Fabrico, Augmentir and similar Connected-Worker platforms charge £20k–£60k+ per site per year to digitise this system. They do useful things — but the system has to work on the whiteboard first. Most failed SaaS rollouts in this space are not software failures; they're DMS-discipline failures dressed up as a tooling problem.

This pack gives you the discipline. Once it's stable for 90 days and the huddles run themselves, then you have an honest business case for the SaaS — and you'll know exactly what to demand of it.

What's in the pack

• Tier 1 Huddle (Shift, 5 min) — board layout, agenda, owner, escalation rules
• Tier 2 Huddle (Daily Ops, 15 min) — escalation from Tier 1, decisions and owners
• Tier 3 Huddle (Weekly Business Review, 30 min) — escalation from Tier 2, KPI roll-up, strategic owner actions
• SQDCP-I metrics framework — six generic ops categories that work for any business