2a. Your shift, start to finish#

The rest of this book is organized screen by screen. This page is organized the other way around: the two routines you actually run every day, pulled together from across the book so you don't have to hunt for them. Nothing here is new — every line links to the chapter that covers it in full.

Print this page, or keep it open, and tick items off as you go.

Start of shift#

• Pick your name. Click the operator field on the bottom status strip and choose (or type) yours — see 1. Getting started §Tell Ring who you are. Do this even if the LCP was never rebooted; Ring remembers the previous operator's name until you change it.
• Check the PLC dot. Bottom status strip, should read green "PLC Connected." If it's anything else, see 1. Getting started §PLC connection indicator before doing anything else.
• Check the alarm-count pill. Should read 0. If it doesn't, click it to jump to Alarms and see what's outstanding — see 4. Alarms and attention.
• Read every banner across the top of the window, not just glance at the color — yellow (demo mode), teal (read-only mode), red (degraded startup) each mean something different. See 1. Getting started §The main window layout.
• Check Shifts → Shifts Control's 8-shift grid for which shift is running. On most stations the Start Shift N / End Shift buttons are hidden (they need a separate controls sign-off most stations don't have — see 3b. Shifts Control) and the controller tracks shift boundaries on its own schedule; if your station is one of the few where those buttons are visible, use them the same way — starting a new shift automatically ends whatever was open.
• Reports → Alarm History, filtered to the overnight window, to see what fired while nobody was watching — see 06-reports-and-history.md §Alarm History.
• Read the last Handoff Note, if there is one — see 3b. Handoff Notes, or the latest note shown on Shift Handover.

End of shift / handover#

• Confirm nothing is left in HOLD. If a batch is on hold and you are not the one resolving it, say so explicitly to the next operator — don't assume the status strip alone will tell them. See 2. Running batches §2.4 and, if you started this hold to abandon a batch, §2.6 Stopping a batch you didn't mean to start.
• Shifts → Handoff Notes. Write down anything the next shift needs that isn't already in a report — a tank behaving oddly, an alarm you silenced but didn't fully resolve, a formula change in progress. See 3b. Handoff Notes.
• Shifts → Shift Handover → Print (or Refresh, if handing over on screen rather than on paper). Walk the next operator through the Batches, Alarms and Still Running tables — the Alarms table's amber State value ("dropped from the PLC's queue without resolving") is worth pointing out by hand, since it doesn't look like an active fault at a glance. See 3b. Shift Handover.
• Shifts → Production Log. Enter the shift's produced square footage if that's tracked at this plant — see 3b. Production Log.
• Say it out loud, not just on screen. A note in Ring is not a substitute for telling the next operator directly if something is genuinely unresolved.