Is CI supposed to feel this disconnected from real work?

I spent six years as a CI coordinator at a stamping plant before I went back to a production role, and I'll admit the criticism lands. The worst stretch was when we had three people tracking OEE on spreadsheets while a coolant leak on the press line went unfixed for weeks. I was part of that problem and I own it. The job slowly turned into making charts for the plant manager instead of standing at the machines with the setters. What changed it for me was a rule our new ops manager brought in: nobody presents an improvement idea in the weekly review unless they've physically watched the process for at least a full shift. Suddenly half the meeting filler disappeared because people couldn't just recycle old data. The changeover work that actually stuck came from a die setter who timed it himself with a stopwatch, not from anyone in my department. On the duplicate paperwork, I got results by asking one question in front of the right people: which board does this update replace? Framing it as consolidation rather than refusal kept me out of trouble, and twice the answer was that the old board could be killed entirely. It also helped to volunteer for the ugly jobs, like standing on the floor during a shift audit, because it gave me credit to spend when I pushed back later.

I'm going to push back a little on where this thread is heading. I work maintenance at a food plant, and I used to share the same eye-rolling at all the boards and reviews. What changed for me was realizing the improvement process is the only lever in the building that reliably moves money and attention, so I started feeding my own work into it instead of fighting it. We had a cracked guard on the filler line that sat on the work order backlog for months. Every time it got bumped for something more urgent. One Friday I resubmitted it as an improvement item instead, with a photo and a rough note about the downtime we'd eat if it let go mid-shift. Approved and replaced inside two weeks. Same building, same people, diferent bucket. So my take is less about resisting the paperwork and more about learning which bucket actually gets funded. The kaizen people respond fast to anything that touches their downtime or safety numbers, because that's what their bosses ask about. I keep a short list of nagging jobs and reframe each one in their language. Feels a bit cynical, but the guard got fixed and the fixture on your line 3 would too.

As for the meetings, I still skip most of them. Nobody has pulled me up on it yet, and the ones I do attend I treat as a chance to pitch my backlog items to a captive audience.

We cut our duplicate tracking down by clipping a laminated sheet and a grease pencil right to the machine frame. Operators scrawled the downtime reason as it happened, and I'd photograph the sheet at shift end. When the CI team saw those actual scribbled numbers sitting next to their polished dashboard numbers, the mismatch made my argument for me. Within a couple weeks they asked if the digital board could just pull from the sheets instead. Didn't solve everything, the broken fixture on our end still crawled through the work order queue, but at least the paperwork got honest.

One thing I'd add from my own expirience: before you push back on any of the tracking, audit the math behind it. I did that at my last job and found our downtime metric was counting changeover time twice because two departments were both logging the same window into separate systems, so the headline number was inflated by a good margin and every meeting was reacting to a problem that didn't exist at the stated size. Once I brought the actual arithmetic to the supervisor, the appetite for that particlar board dried up on its own, which was far less painful than arguing about it directly. Worth checking whether your duplicate paperwork is even consistent with itself before you fight it.