The 15-Minute Engineering Daily Meeting

Why this matters in food manufacturing A daily engineering meeting should create decisions about today’s risk. It should not become a detailed history of yesterday or a forum where every engineer reports everything they did. Fifteen disciplined minutes can align safety, production risk, labour, planned work and escalation across shifts. 1. Start with safety and food safety Review incidents, unsafe conditions, permits, isolations, temporary repairs and engineering issues affecting product or hygiene. Anything requiring immediate control is assigned before moving on. Keep discussion factual. Detailed investigation happens outside the meeting with the right people. 2. Review the last 24 hours Focus on significant breakdowns, repeat faults and losses that threaten today’s plan. Confirm temporary recovery versus permanent corrective action. Do not read the entire breakdown log. Use thresholds so the meeting concentrates on consequential events. 3. Control today’s work Confirm available labour, priority planned jobs, statutory work, production access and contractor activity. Identify conflicts before technicians are dispatched. Protect planned work from avoidable interruption while retaining capacity for genuine reactive demand. 4. Expose backlog and risk Surface overdue critical work,…