Improving Your Workplace with Visual Management

Time. No matter what, it seems like there’s never enough, right? One way to save time is to make your workplace more visual, infusing it with information that answers the critical and recurrent questions of people working there. With a glance people can get the information they need without having to waste time searching for it.

Visual Management systems “enable anyone to immediately assess the current status of an operation or process at a glance, regardless of their knowledge of the process. Visual displays relate information and data to employees in an area through the use of charts, graphs, and process documentation.” (Continuous Improvement Glossary)

In the article “Visual Management,” authors Phuong Nguyen, and Jim Mullen, Nosco, Inc., give the 15,000-ft view of how to immediately spot areas to improve and apply this system to an operation.

Examples from the pressroom

You notice that the preproduction team was overproducing for some presses and underproducing for others. Now staging orders for the presses has become disorganized, causing frustration across departments. What do you do?

• Call a cross-functional team meeting to decide how to improve the staging order of the presses.
• Have them create makeready carts with a preflight checklist to visually communicate when a cart is ready.
• Tape off and label areas around each press for completed staged carts to reside until your press operator needs them.

Your results:

• Reduced downtime—everyone knows when staged orders are ready.
• A visual management method for the process of staging orders.
• A sustained process—front-line leads and managers use a Kamishibai audit board (uses

a red/green card system along with standardized questions to ask various team members how the process is working. Red means the audit was not done. If the card is green, this means the audit was completed. Any corrective actions are written on the green side.)

How to get started

Implement the 5S system (Sort, Set-in-order, Shine, Standardize, and Sustain). Use visual tools to create a Lean environment, including signage, labeling, location markers, color coding, standard work visuals, and metric boards. With these visuals you will have a clean plant and can better manage your processes.

We also recommend studying other successful Lean organizations with a proven track record of recognizing and leading change. Some managers, like Managing for Improvement Award recipients William Denzen, general manager of rollfed and Red Rock Technologies business units for Smyth Companies, and Timothy Keran, CEO and owner of Western Graphics, have found winning recipes for creating real and lasting improvement for their companies!

Think of it like this

The bottom line for visual management is staying tuned in to what’s happening in your operation. As a parallel example, say you’re at home watching the Super Bowl. You leave the room for a few minutes, and when you return to your TV, all of the elements that clue you into how the game is progressing have disappeared—the score, time left on the clock, down and distance, time outs remaining, etc. You’ve lost the ability to instantly evaluate the game. If you were the coach, you would not be able to quickly react and impact the game’s outcome.

Nguyen and Mullen say, “That is sometimes what present-day management is without visual management. We have to know the status of a process at a glance in order to evaluate and take action if necessary.”

To learn more, read the full article from Printing Industries of America: The Magazine here.

Do you know a manager who has created real and lasting improvement for their company? Why not nominate them for a Managing for Improvement Award? Nominations are due February 13, 2015.

The winning manager will be recognized at the 2015 Continuous Improvement Conference, April 12–15, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.