Tag: 5S

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Obeya: Visual Factory + Teamwork

I just came across a term I wasn’t familiar with: obeya.  (I think it’s pronounced o-bay-a, but I’m not certain.)  It’s used most often in  the term “obeya room”, which is a bit redundant given that “obeya” is Japanese for “big room”.  I became acquainted with the term in this Industry Week article…you should read it because it provides several examples as to just what an obeya is and how it works.

Turns out that obeya combines a couple of ideas that we’ve all been on board with:  collaboration and visual management.  The concept is that you put your most important visual indicators together in one room…then you talk about them every day.  Several times a day, in fact.

From the article:

“[The plant manager’s] first stop is the command center. “I can quickly — very quickly — determine if I’m on schedule everywhere or, if I’m not on schedule, where am I not on schedule and why am I not on schedule,” he says. Stop two is any place there is a deviation.”

Now, I’m going to pat myself on the back a bit here.  This is, nearly verbatim, what I’ve told all my clients is the primary goal of 5S and Visual Management:  to be able to tell, at a glance, whether or not a process or several processes are in control or not.

The real benefit of obeya, though, comes through deliberation and discussion of the data displayed by the visuals. Again, from the article:

“What we try to do is let the management team at the manager level lead the meeting,” Redelman says. “We want to encourage direct dialog between the managers so they take ownership of the condition.” The meeting is most effective, he adds, “when the managers and SMEs are gathered, speaking to each other, and the executive team has faded to the back and just offers suggestion when necessary or helps to prioritize the focus to wrap up the meeting.”

Discussions about lean and obeya frequently emphasize the human element, the need for individuals to physically interact with the data to take full advantage of an obeya’s promise. It’s a point Toyota emphasizes as well.”

Did you catch that?  It’s not so much that a company simply posts a bunch of visuals around the walls of a room.  It’s that managers and associates actually take time to look at and talk about the information on the charts.  And the conversations lead to actions.  This is a good example of the needed culture change that goes along with all lean methods.  My experience has been that it’s actually pretty difficult to create such straightforward change.   We’re just talking about regular, frequent, short meetings, after all.  Some companies start them, then they fizzle out for a variety of reasons.  Other companies never bother.  Both types of companies end up wondering why lean methods never really worked for them.  I guess they just figured that charts on the walls would, somehow, magically improve their operations.

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5S and Culture Change

I’ve been catching up on my reading on the Industry Week web site.  (Full Disclosure:  I’ve written articles for both the IW website and the magazine but don’t and never have made any money from them.)  I found one that speaks to an issue that I cover here quite a bit: culture change.  The article “10 Steps to Create a Continuous Improvement Culture”, reviews a presentation that Steve Olsen, Executive Vice President of Camcraft, an automotive components supplier, made to the 2016 Industry Week Manufacturing & Technology Conference & Expo.

Managers always like to hear what other managers have to say about what’s worked and what hasn’t for them.  And Olsen has some important things to say.  Here’s a summary of his ten steps:

  1. Get Help
  2. Choose What Fits
  3. Explain Why (Over and over and over)
  4. Keep It Simple
  5. Help People See
  6. Find Allies
  7. Be Open
  8. Be Generous
  9. Be Creative
  10. Be Patient

I’ll let you read the article to get Olsen’s details on all ten steps but there is one I’d like to highlight:  Explain Why (Over and over and over).  In my experience, managers don’t spend enough time…not nearly enough time…talking with employees about the continuous improvement initiative.  Sure, there’s almost always some sort of “launch” where managers express their total and undying commitment to the continuous improvement initiative again.  Too often that’s the last time anyone hears much of anything from management until it becomes clear that the initiative isn’t gaining traction.  At which time management starts asking “What the hell happened?”

I occasionally teach an Organization Behavior course at nearby Kent State University.  In that course, I focus on management of culture change.  I tell my students that change always creates resistance, that there’s no such thing as “no resistance” to change of any sort.  Managers do need to manage resistance as it becomes evident.  In the course, I covered a model for managing that resistance.  An important element of that model was stated this way:  Communication3  (that’s supposed to read “Communication Cubed” but I can’t do the 3 as a superscript).  By that, I meant that, before and during any change effort, managers needed to communicate a lot.  More than they’d think they’d need to.  Then, more than that.  I tell my students that, during a change effort, there’s no such thing as too much communication.

The idea of Communication3 carries with it the fact of lots of repetition.  Managers too often feel that, once they announce something (or, worse yet, once they post it on the bulletin board), everyone ought to hear and understand the message.  It just doesn’t work that way.  Managers need to tell each other and all associates why and how the organization is going about the change effort…over and over and over, using essentially the same words.

Let’s look at an example, one that I might have used before.  A plant manager I once worked with was upset that workers weren’t putting the change over tools back on the shadowboard he’d installed.  He had put the board up, announced to the crew what he wanted to happen, and returned to his office.  As far as I know, he didn’t mention the shadowboard or its purpose again until he complained to me about the fact that nobody paid any attention to it.

I told him that he needed to come out onto the shop floor twice daily (at least) to look at the shadow board and talk to the operators about its use.  If the tools were there, he could say to his supervisors and operators, “Good work.  That’s just what I wanted to see.  Anybody got any ideas as to how we can improve it?”  If the tools weren’t there, he should gather his supervisors together and say, “My damn tools aren’t where they are supposed to be.  I expect them to be where they are supposed to be when they are supposed to be there.  I expect you to reinforce this message with the operators.”  Twice a day.  Every day.

After awhile, he can reduce his communications to once a day, then to a few times a week, then to once a week and so on.

The central message is this:  if you aren’t talking about your continuous improvement effort to others in your organization several times a day at the start and several times a week even after it gains momentum, you aren’t doing your job as manager.