The real cost of chasing job status, with the math.

A customer calls and asks where their order is. Someone in the office walks out to the floor, finds the traveler, asks the lead, waits for the lead to finish a setup, walks back, and calls the customer. Twenty minutes gone. Multiply that by every job somebody asked about this week, and by everyone who went looking, and you have a cost that never shows up on a report. This post puts a number on it. The formula is the same one behind the chase line in our ROI calculator, and you can run it with your own payroll figures before you finish your coffee.

Chasing status has a name in lean. Two names, actually.

Taiichi Ohno, who built the foundation of the Toyota Production System, sorted waste into seven categories.^[1] His book on the system first appeared in Japan in 1978, and Productivity Press published the English edition in 1988.^[2] Toyota still describes TPS as a system built on the complete elimination of waste in pursuit of the most efficient methods.^[3]

Two of Ohno's seven wastes describe chasing job status exactly.

The Lean Enterprise Institute defines motion as "operators making movements that are straining or unnecessary, such as looking for parts, tools, documents, etc."^[1] Looking for a document is the textbook case. When your scheduler walks the floor to find out whether a job cleared the brake press, that is motion waste, even though the scheduler is working hard the whole time.

LEI defines waiting as operators standing idle while machines cycle, equipment fails, or needed parts fail to arrive.^[1] Information that fails to arrive belongs on that list too. The operator who cannot start the next job because nobody has confirmed the material is released is waiting. The customer service rep who is on hold with the floor is waiting.

Art Smalley, writing for LEI, points out that in the older Toyota teaching, waiting was one of seventeen motion wastes, so the two are really one family.^[4] He also notes that motion waste is not just physical. It can happen "on a keyboard," and of those seventeen classic motions only about three added value.^[5] Clicking through four screens in an ERP to find a status that is three days stale counts.

A NIST technical note on inventory and flow time in U.S. manufacturing uses the same seven categories. It describes motion waste as unnecessary motion that results in unnecessary expenditure of time and resources, and waiting as the state when workers and equipment are waiting for material and parts and those resources are being wasted.^[6]

Toyota's own description of Just-in-Time has a line I keep coming back to: "Don't allow goods and information to be held up during production."^[3] Goods and information. A job whose status nobody can see is information held up, and the chase is what the shop does to get it moving again.

The South Carolina MEP puts it plainly: ask ten people on a shop floor to name a waste and most will say scrap, when the other categories are often bigger and quieter.^[7] Chasing status is the quiet one. Nobody writes it on a scrap ticket.

The formula

Here is the chase line from the HixonOps ROI calculator, written out:

People x hours per week x 4.33 x loaded rate x reduction = monthly savings

Each term is a number you can get this week.

The 4.33 is just the conversion from weekly hours to monthly dollars. The rest is where honest shops and optimistic shops part ways, so let me take each one.

People

Count everyone who goes looking, not just the people whose job title says expediter. The scheduler, customer service, the shipping lead, a floor supervisor, and the owner all end up on the list. The person being asked is also spending time. If a lead gets interrupted four times a shift to answer "where is job 4471," that is their time too, and it is the time of whoever is standing behind them waiting for the setup to resume.

Hours per week

This is the number most people guess wrong, in both directions. Do not guess. Have each person keep a tally for one week: a tick mark every time they stop what they are doing to find out the status of a job, and a rough minute count next to it. Five days of tick marks will surprise you. Leads tend to answer from memory, and the office has to go walk, so the two tallies rarely match the guesses.

Loaded rate

Use the loaded rate, not the hourly wage. A wage understates what an hour of chasing costs you, because you also pay the employer side of payroll taxes, insurance, paid leave, and retirement on that hour. The next section gives you the published figures.

Reduction

The calculator defaults to 50 percent. That is a starting point, not a promise. Nothing removes every status question. Customers still call. Rush jobs still happen. What a shared, current view of the floor removes is the walking, the phone tag, and the second and third ask when the first answer turned out to be wrong. Put in the number you believe, run it, then run it again at half that number. If the conservative case still pays, you have your answer.

Where the loaded rate comes from

The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes Employer Costs for Employee Compensation every quarter. The release for June 2026, published on September 9, 2026, breaks out manufacturing by establishment size in Table 6.^[8]

Source: BLS ECEC, June 2026, Table 6.^[8]

Read the ratio, not the absolute numbers. In establishments with 1 to 99 workers, benefits ran $11.78 on top of $29.03 in wages, so total compensation was about 1.4 times the wage. Across all of manufacturing, $16.12 in benefits on $32.50 in wages puts the multiplier near 1.5.^[8] So a workable rule for a small or mid-size shop is:

Loaded rate = hourly wage x 1.4 to 1.5

A supervisor earning $32 an hour costs you roughly $45 to $48 an hour before you count the desk, the tools, or the phone. That is why the calculator's default loaded rate is $45.

For a cross-check on the wage side, the BLS Employment Situation for September 2026 reports average hourly earnings of $36.92 for all employees in manufacturing, $39.08 in durable goods and $33.23 in nondurable goods.^[9] That series covers all employees on the payroll, not just production workers, which is closer to the mix of people who chase status.

Two cautions. First, these are national averages. Your region, your trades, and your benefit plan will differ, and your payroll system already has the real number. Use it. Second, BLS total compensation covers wages and benefits only. It does not include the supervisor's share of overhead, so if your accountant gives you a fully burdened rate, it will be higher, and it is fair to use that instead.

Three shops, worked out

Here is the formula applied to three made-up shops with round numbers. None of these is a customer or a claim. They are arithmetic.

Shop B is the calculator's default: three people, six hours a week, $45 loaded, half the chasing removed. Three people and six hours sounds small until you see that it is 78 hours a month, two full working weeks of one person, spent finding out things that could have been on a screen.

Notice what the reduction does in Shop C. A larger shop with more people chasing can use a more conservative reduction and still land on a bigger number, because the base is bigger. That is the point of writing the math out instead of asserting a percentage.

What this formula leaves out

The chase line is deliberately narrow. It counts the time of the person who went looking and nothing else. That makes it easy to defend in a budget meeting, and it also makes it a floor, not a ceiling. Three things sit outside it.

The other side of the conversation. Every status question has an answerer. If the answerer is a setup person, the machine is not running while they answer. LEI's definition of waiting includes operators standing idle while needed parts fail to arrive,^[1] and a job that cannot start because its status is unknown is the same waste wearing different clothes.

The late order itself. Chasing status is usually a symptom. The job is being chased because somebody is worried it is late, and often it is. The calculator has a separate line for late orders (late count x cost per late order x reduction) so that you do not double count, and so that you can see which of the two is bigger in your shop. Often it is the late orders. The steel products maker I worked with had over $700,000 tied up in late orders. Six months later it was under $50,000, with no new system, just everyone looking at the same numbers every day.

The queue you cannot see. When nobody can see status, nobody can see where the work is piling up either, and the bottleneck moves around in the dark. That is a different post: Find your bottleneck from WIP data, not gut feel. The same data that answers "where is job 4471" also answers "where do jobs sit the longest," and the second question is worth more.

What actually reduces the chasing

The formula tells you what the waste costs. It does not tell you how to remove it, and I want to be careful here because the reduction term is where the vendor fluff usually creeps in.

The lean answer predates any software. LEI defines visual management as putting tools, parts, production activities, and performance indicators in plain view "so the status of the system can be understood at a glance by everyone involved."^[10] Toyota's andon does the same job for abnormalities: when something stops, the board lights up, and people respond only when there is a problem instead of standing watch.^[3] A whiteboard with every open job and its current operation, updated at each handoff, is a legitimate production tracking system. If your shop has twelve jobs open at a time, start there.

Polaris MEP, the Rhode Island center, quotes one of its project managers on where waste reduction starts: "You have to truly know where the job starts with information, people, and material."^[11] That is a useful test for any tracking method, paper or digital. Can everyone see where the information is, not just where the parts are?

The whiteboard breaks down when the job count climbs, when there are two shifts, when the office is in a different building from the floor, or when the customer wants an answer by email in five minutes. At that point the status has to live somewhere everyone can reach it, and it has to update where the work happens rather than at the end of the day. That is the job of an MES. Ours sits on top of the ERP and CRM you already have, so the scheduler, the floor, and the person on the phone with the customer are reading the same screen; the details are at /#mes. Whether you build that view on a whiteboard, a spreadsheet, or software, the measure of success is the same: the tally in Part 1 goes down.

MEP centers have treated lean as a primary line of business for two decades, and the program defines lean as "the establishment of a systematic approach to eliminating waste and creating flow throughout the whole company."^[12] If you want outside help getting the tally and the fix done, MEP centers offer coaching and training in lean, value stream mapping, and kaizen, and the NIST MEP fact sheet describes what they offer.^[13]

Run your own numbers

The pattern I saw in thirteen years of fixing late orders was never bad people. It was good people, scattered data, and nobody looking at the same numbers. Chasing job status is what good people do when the data is scattered. It feels like work, and it is work, but Ohno would have called it motion and waiting, and the math above says it costs a small shop somewhere between a nice truck and a new hire every year.

Do the tally this week. Put the real numbers in the calculator. If the conservative case does not pay, you have learned something cheap. If it does, you have a number to put in front of whoever signs the checks, and a formula they can check with their own payroll.