What Is an SQDC Board | Eviview

An SQDC board is a visual management tool that tracks how a team is performing across four key areas: Safety, Quality, Delivery, and Cost. Each letter gets its own column on the board, with today’s status, the target, and a red or green signal so anyone can read the state of the operation at a glance.

It’s one of the most common frameworks used in lean manufacturing, and it’s the structure most tier boards and tier meetings are built around.

Here’s what each column covers:

S, Safety. Incidents, near misses, audit findings, and safety observations from the floor.

Q, Quality. Defects, deviations, customer complaints, and first-time-right rate.

D, Delivery. Output against plan, OEE, and schedule adherence.

C, Cost. Scrap, rework, overtime, and material loss.

You’ll often see the same board called an SQDCP board, with P for People added at the end. The People column tracks engagement, attendance, training, and improvement ideas. It was added for a practical reason: factories quickly learn that they can’t sustain Safety, Quality, Delivery, and Cost performance without a workforce that’s engaged. Some plants use SQDCM instead, with M for Morale.

The reason this format works is that it forces balance. The four categories never change, so trends become easy to read across days, weeks, and quarters. It also makes trade-offs visible. A team can’t quietly push output at the cost of safety, because both are sitting on the same board, in front of the same people, every morning.

The weakness of an SQDC board is purely physical. A whiteboard version is only as accurate as the last person who updated it, and it can’t be seen across multiple sites. A digital version keeps the same structure and the same daily rhythm, but pulls the data live, so the numbers in front of the team are actually true when the meeting starts.

If your SQDC boards still rely on someone updating them by hand each morning, it might be time to see how a live version works. Book a discovery call.