The email arrives with a PDF: the safety, people, quality, delivery and cost board corporate wants in every plant. Sometimes it includes dimensions. It almost never includes the wall.
And the wall decides everything. That file was designed on a screen, for a plant that is not yours.
What the file does not tell you
It does not say whether the board hangs in an aisle with forklift traffic, at what height people will read it, or whether it gets filled in with markers every shift. It does not say whether the wall is block, drywall or sheet metal.
Each of those answers changes the material, the mounting and the type size. A board identical to the PDF can look perfect in the conference room and fail on the line.
The print goes underneath
On a KPI board, the grid is the one thing that should never wipe off. So we print it under the acrylic: markers write and erase on top, and the layout stays intact.
When the grid is printed on top, the eraser takes it away a little at a time. A few months in, some columns are unreadable and someone is redrawing them with tape.
A wall, not a board
Plants running visual management rarely need one board. They need five, one per metric, and it pays to treat them as a wall: same height, same frame, the same left to right read.
Ordered one at a time, each arrives slightly different and the wall looks patched together. Ordered together, corporate sees in the photo exactly what it expected.
What to send for a quote
The corporate file, a photo of the wall it goes on and the size of the space. If the board is filled in by hand, tell us how often. We come back with material, final size and installed price.
Before you send it to production
It pays to review the file with whoever fills in the board, not just whoever ordered it. The shift supervisor knows whether the weekly column leaves room for a thick marker, or whether the incidents row needs twice the space.
That change costs little before cutting and a lot after. So when you send the layout, we return a scaled visual with the final size for the person who will actually use it.
Can you reproduce the board we already use?
Yes. From the file or a photo of the current board, and if you want to adjust columns this is the moment.
Do you install inside the plant?
Yes. We enter with REPSE, IMSS and liability insurance current, and installed work carries a one year written warranty.
Can we change the layout later?
If you know it will change, we build it with a swappable insert so only the printed part gets replaced, not the whole board.