Visual management is a hot topic in lean manufacturing. It is not a do-or-do-not method like kanban or SMED, but it is an underlying soft approach that just makes manufacturing easier. It won’t fundamentally change your operations, but it will smoothen a lot of problems. In this post I will go through the reasons WHY a shop floor needs visual management.
Stack lights are found everywhere in industry. And for a good reason. They are a quick and easy way to visualize the status of a machine, which otherwise would need some effort to see. They are—sort of—a mini-andon. While sometimes underappreciated, they do serve a valuable purpose in the factory, and they usually do a good job. Let’s have a look at stack lights!
On a modern shop floor, you will find lots of data and documentation. These are quite useful to track and improve the situation in the operations. Many of them are quite nicely printed charts, diagrams, and tables of key performance indicators (KPIs). However, when I look closer at them, I often find that they were last updated six months ago, or even more than one year ago. That is useless in practical terms! You need up-to-date information if you want to manage a process. For this, entering data by hand is most useful. In this post I will discuss different advantages of tracking data by hand on the shop floor.
For larger improvement projects with a dedicated project team, there is frequently a „war room,“ a conference room where all the project-related information and performance measures are kept. The name sounds cool and gives a certain air of focus to the project.
The name, however, comes from war rooms for real wars. Recently I had the chance to visit the Lascaris War Rooms in Malta, where I was able to see many tools and practices that are still common nowadays in manufacturing and project management.
Standardization, visual management, and process confirmation are some important elements of lean manufacturing. Here we have an example many of you are probably familiar with – toilet paper folding at hotels. This simple example can clearly demonstrate the value of Standardization, visual management, and process confirmation.