Baton-touch
A handover complete enough that the next trade starts at once. The next process is my customer.
A baton-pass succeeds only when the work handed over is finished on time and to a quality so complete that the receiving worker can begin at once, without doubting it, inspecting it or adding work. Each worker treats the next process as the most important customer he has, and the target is rework zero.
The discipline is concrete: heat-scorched primer cleaned and touched up on the spot after welding, finished parts wrapped against damage before transport, material supplied in work sequence and oriented for installation. When that chain of trust holds, the whole process flows.
An example: Integration in seven months
The work was divided more finely than ever before, so the number of handovers rose more than fivefold, and total lead time fell with it.