Every organisation has daily management. Almost none have designed it. What passes for daily management in most workplaces is a collection of meetings, reports, walk-arounds, and escalations that accumulated over time — each added to address a specific need, none designed as part of a coherent system. The supervisor holds a morning huddle because someone once decided they should. The whiteboard shows yesterday’s numbers because someone once put them there. Problems get escalated because someone once got in trouble for not escalating. But the architecture connecting strategic intent to daily action to problem detection to capability development was never designed as a whole. The result is daily management that consumes enormous leadership energy while failing to connect what happens on the floor to what the organisation is trying to achieve.
But the most important word in Floor Management Development System is not “management.” It is “development.” FMDS is fundamentally a system for developing people who can think autonomously — identifying root causes through why-why analysis, implementing countermeasures, standardising what works through SDCA discipline, and sharing effective improvements across the organisation through yokoten. The boards make work visible. The routines detect abnormality early. But the purpose is to build human capability, not to monitor compliance.
This workshop develops the ability to design and install FMDS as a coherent daily management architecture. It is not a workshop about boards and meetings. It is a workshop about designing the system that connects strategy to daily action, makes normality and abnormality visible, develops people through structured problem-solving, and sustains performance through SDCA discipline rather than through management attention that inevitably moves elsewhere.
The Floor Management Development System is Toyota’s answer to this architectural gap. FMDS is not a set of boards or a meeting format. It is a designed system that breaks company policies and goals into issues that are tackled on-site on a daily basis — creating a direct, visible, traceable connection between what top management intends and what every person does today. The Daily Management Board is the central instrument, visually linking three elements that most organisations keep separate: the policy or target that management aims to achieve, the management indicators that measure progress through both control points and inspection points, and the improvement and problem-solving work that addresses the gap between the two. These are organised across the five management pillars — Safety, Quality, Production, Cost, and Human Resource Development — and operated through two interconnected cycles: the upper cycle that checks whether targets are being achieved, and the lower cycle that gathers the team to identify and solve the specific problems preventing achievement.
The six sessions follow the SPFRDC sequence and are designed for leaders who are responsible for how daily management actually works — supervisors, team leaders, operations managers, and business improvement managers who sense that their current daily routines produce activity without architectural coherence.
Course Content
This course is Delivered one per year in June 2026 – unless otherwise requested. It is made available on the Learning Hub.
Session
1
Strategy — Why Daily Management Is Architecture, Not Routine
The strategic purpose of FMDS as the link between policy and daily execution. Why most daily management fails to connect what happens on the floor to what the organisation is trying to achieve. The distinction between SDCA and PDCA — maintaining standards versus changing them — and why SDCA must be established before PDCA can be effective. The five management pillars and how they create a complete management view rather than a production-only focus. Human Resource Development as a pillar equal to Safety, Quality, Production, and Cost — not an HR programme but an architectural principle that daily management develops people, not just performance.
session
2
Planning — Designing the Daily Management Board
The architecture of the Daily Management Board as an SDCA instrument. Designing the three-column logic: policy and target deployment from company goals, management indicators that distinguish control points from inspection points, and improvement themes with visible progress. Breaking company-wide policies into workplace-level targets that people can act on today. The FMDS maturity model — from Level 1 where boards exist but are not used, through to Level 4 where the system drives autonomous problem-solving and capability development. Designing your board architecture for your specific context rather than copying a template.
session
3
Follow-Up — The Development Routines That Make the Board Live
The three rhythm levels of daily management: daily huddles that detect abnormality and assign response, weekly reviews that develop the teams understanding of information flow. The diagnostic discipline — four questions that distinguish symptoms from causes: what is the standard, what is the actual condition, what is the gap, and what is producing the gap? Leader standard work for supervisors — the designed sequence of observation, checking, coaching, and escalation that makes daily management a development system rather than a monitoring system
Session
4
Results Analysis — Reading What Daily Management Reveals
Using management indicators to detect abnormality before it becomes a crisis — the principle that target lines on graphs make normality versus abnormality instantly visible. The upper cycle in practice: checking whether policies and targets are being achieved using objective criteria. Why-why analysis as diagnostic discipline — asking why five times to reach root cause rather than addressing symptoms. The distinction between problems that daily management can resolve within its authority and problems that require escalation to cross-functional management. How results analysis reveals not just process problems but management system gaps — where the architecture itself is failing to detect, escalate, or respond.
session
5
Discovery — From Problem Detection to Improvement and Yokoten
The lower cycle in practice: gathering the team to identify specific problems preventing goal achievement and solving them systematically. Standardising effective improvements through SDCA — ensuring that what works today becomes the baseline for tomorrow rather than a one-off fix that decays. Yokoten as architectural discipline — designing how successful improvements transfer horizontally across departments and shifts, lifting the entire organisation rather than creating isolated pockets of excellence. Making hidden work visible — particularly in office and indirect environments where rework, interruptions, and coordination failures are invisible until someone designs a system to detect them.
session
6
Capability Development — FMDS as a People Development System
The deepest purpose of FMDS: cultivating employees who think autonomously rather than waiting for instructions. The supervisor’s role as the primary developer of people — designing the daily management interaction so that every problem detection becomes a coaching opportunity, every abnormality response develops judgment, every standard review builds understanding of the process. The OJD four-step cycle embedded in daily management routines — identifying suitable work, assigning with developmental intent, monitoring and leading through the process, creating a sense of achievement. Connecting FMDS to the four-level management system — how daily management at the floor level feeds into cross-functional management and policy management, and how the governance rhythm ensures coherence across all levels. Installing FMDS as a permanent capability rather than a programme that depends on any individual leader’s attention.