Separate Required Hold Time from Waiting for a Decision
Which part of a quality hold can be shortened through better evidence and coverage without weakening release requirements?
A held lot can be waiting for evidence, waiting for someone to review evidence, or waiting for an approved action to be executed.
Those intervals have different causes. Combining them into one average hold time makes it difficult to choose a useful improvement.
I would start with the decision record for a small set of completed and still-open holds.
Divide the clock by what the lot needs next
Record detection, containment, evidence requested, evidence available, authorized disposition, and completion of the resulting action.
Keep overlapping intervals explicit. A laboratory activity and a record review may proceed together. Summing their durations can overstate the delay.
For open holds, report current age and the next unresolved requirement. Excluding unresolved records from the average makes the queue look better by removing the longest waits.
Preserve the reason for waiting
Classify necessary technical work separately from missing information, handoff delay, unavailable authority, and execution delay.
A required study or investigation is not wasted time simply because the product occupies space. The production schedule does not determine whether the evidence is sufficient.
Likewise, a lot eventually released without rework does not prove the hold was unnecessary. The information available at detection may have justified containment.
The useful question is whether the same sound decision could have been made earlier with complete records, available resources, or a clearer route to the authorized reviewer.
Test a specific change
If the repeated delay is missing batch information, improve the evidence packet at hold creation. If it is unclear ownership, name the reviewer and escalation route. If the qualified decision-maker is unavailable on a shift, evaluate appropriate coverage.
Any change to delegated authority or technical release criteria belongs through the established quality approval process. A throughput target is not permission to release marginal product.
Keep other quality work visible. Dedicating a person to holds can move the queue elsewhere if that person also performs necessary monitoring or incoming inspection.
Measure the resource consequence
Track occupied vessels, pallet positions, handling, and actual work deferred. Held value is a stock of working capital; carrying cost is the cost of holding that value over time. They are not the same number.
If a vessel is occupied, count the elapsed vessel time once. Do not multiply that time again by the duration of the same hold.
Evaluate released product and approved rework separately from the decision queue. Faster disposition can improve planning without guaranteeing less rework or more shipments.
The decision should identify one avoidable wait, the evidence supporting that diagnosis, the change responsible for removing it, and the resource expected to become usable. It is a narrower claim than saying quality is the bottleneck, and a more useful one.