Scrap tallies often arrive as a single daily number. For a plant supervisor, that hides whether the morning crew or the night crew carried the loss.
Start by splitting scrap into three buckets that operators already recognize: material defects found at incoming, process defects found mid-line, and final inspection rejects. Keep the buckets separate for each shift.
When a spike appears, ask whether the same station, the same part family, or the same supplier lot shows up. A spike that follows one supplier lot is a purchasing conversation. A spike that follows one station across every shift is a maintenance conversation.
Give supervisors a five-minute end-of-shift habit: circle the two largest scrap reasons, note any holds still open, and leave one sentence for the next crew. The note should name the station and the part, not a vague warning.
Plants that keep this rhythm usually stop arguing about who caused the scrap and start fixing the station that keeps producing it.