A3 Report Generator
Sections already laid out · Saved in your browser · Print to PDF
Ref: Shook, Managing to Learn · Rother & Shook · TWI Job Instruction
I Select Document Type
II Document Sections
Free Limit Reached
This page keeps up to 5 documents in your browser — nothing is sent anywhere, which is also why the limit exists. An account carries improvement work properly: a charter promoted from a value stream map keeps the map and the kaizen burst that produced it, its actions and commitments live on the entry, and the before-and-after is read off the map rather than typed into a document.
How that works →IIIWhat these documents are for
An A3 is not a report format, it is a thinking discipline that happens to fit on one sheet of A3 paper. The constraint is the point: if the problem, the evidence, the cause, the countermeasure and the follow-up do not fit on one page, the thinking is not finished. The sections here are in the order the thinking has to happen — you cannot write the target condition honestly before you have described the current one with numbers.
The section most often left blank is the last one. Follow-up and confirmation is what separates an A3 from a proposal: a date to re-measure, and a statement of what result would mean it worked. Without it nobody ever finds out, and the next A3 on the same process starts from scratch.
A kaizen charter does the opposite job — it is written before the work, to agree what the work is and what it will be judged by. One primary measure beats four. The team table exists because over-commitment, not bad ideas, is the usual reason an improvement program stalls: the same four people end up named on everything.
Standard work here follows the TWI job-breakdown shape — step, key point, and reason. The third column is the one people omit and the only one that transfers skill; a step without its reason is a rule to be forgotten. Note also the abnormal-condition section: standard work that covers only the good case is half written.
The 5-why has a second thread most templates miss. One line of questioning explains why the problem happened; a separate one asks why it escaped to the customer. They usually have different answers and different countermeasures. And if a chain terminates at “operator error”, it has stopped at a description rather than a cause.
Everything on this page stays in your browser — there is no account and nothing is uploaded. If you want an improvement tied to a measure on a real value stream rather than a number typed into a document, that is what the vandrebok and value stream mapping do.
This is one of the bench instruments, standing alone
The calculator above takes numbers you type, one set at a time. On the bench, the same solver runs against a dataset you keep — versioned, with the conditions held beside the result, so the number can still be explained to someone who asks six months from now.