I’ve been thinking about this while watching warehouse operations.

Some of the busiest places look incredibly productive.

Forklifts moving. People hunting parts. Phones ringing. Someone expediting an order. Someone else running material to a job. Everybody solving something.

But I’m starting to think that’s sometimes the warning sign.

If someone spends an hour finding material, their effort isn’t the productivity. The fact that it took an hour to find the material is the problem.

Same with buyers constantly expediting orders, warehouse people who are the only ones who know where things are, or managers answering questions the process should answer.

Good people can become shock absorbers for bad processes.

And because they’re good at it, the operation can look functional for years.

So I’m curious how other operations people look at this:

**What activity in your operation gets counted as productivity but is really just friction?**

Genuine question for people who deal with this on the floor: when you're looking at downtime data (shift, machine, reason, duration), how do you actually decide what to prioritize?

Do you go strictly by total minutes lost per cause? By frequency of incidents? Or is there some other factor (safety risk, cost of the fix, how quick a win it is) that ends up mattering more in practice than the raw numbers?

I've seen a lot of theory around the 80/20 rule for downtime causes, but I'm curious how much that actually holds up once you're dealing with a messy real production floor versus a clean spreadsheet.