Overview
Twice a day, Team Leaders and Group Leaders at a leading automotive manufacturer’s assembly plant gathered in front of a physical magnet board to staff every production line for the coming shift, resolving PTO, call-ins, and absences on the spot from memory. The only digital record was a detailed Excel workbook that someone had to update by hand to mirror the board. The team at evolv set out to build a digital twin of that board that works alongside the daily huddle instead of replacing it. The design target was the plant floor itself: users wearing gloves, working in noise, and glancing at a shared screen between tasks.
action plan
Build a glanceable, certification-aware digital version of the plant’s staffing board. It needed to let leaders schedule, borrow, and adjust coverage across every production line with minimal clicks, while keeping a full record of what actually happened each shift.
Steps
1
Digitize the core scheduling workflow. The work started with a two-line pilot. The team redesigned the Team Member tile so it could be read at a glance, with higher contrast, stronger hierarchy, and color coding by production line. They also merged scheduling and cross-line borrowing into a single Build/Borrow view.
2
Build the certification-aware system around it. New Line, Process, and Team Member Management screens linked each process to the people certified to run it. That data powers an Availability Grid and an in-grid availability popover, plus Collaborative Build for trainee and QC pairings. It also drives automated job rotation through Pull Forward and Rotate, and a change history that records a reason for every edit made after posting.
3
Test end to end before go-live. A team of about 10 people spent four days running the full staffing process as Group Leaders and Staff across Chrome, Edge, iPad, and desktop, working through simulated call-ins and injuries. In parallel, Business Analysts trained future users on the plant floor ahead of a live line trial.
Results to date
2 → 18 Production Lines and Counting
The platform has grown from a two-line pilot to plant-wide coverage, and more lines are being added as the rollout continues.
Fluent by Day Three in Pre-Launch Testing
In a four-day internal simulation, schedule creation went from slow first runs to smooth by the third session, and a live line trial with plant users comes next.
Every Change Has a Reason
Any edit made after a schedule is posted now requires a logged reason, which sets up a shift-by-shift history the physical board never kept once the platform is live on the floor.
Conclusion
“The board has always worked because the people standing in front of it know every line by heart. This app puts that knowledge into a system: who’s certified, who’s available, and why every change was made. Now it’s there for everyone, not just whoever set up the board that morning.” — Group Leader, Vehicle Assembly