We’re probably blind to all the visual controls that guide our daily activities and, most importantly, save lives. The globally recognized skull and crossbones hazard symbol that indicates poison. A simple 19-item surgical checklist that reduces the death rate by 40%. A bright red stop sign.

Lean manufacturers also leverage visual management to improve systems by preventing errors and resolving issues. It focuses on creating a visual workplace that facilitates clear communication, enhances collaboration, and provides real-time insights into key performance indicators (KPIs). It involves using visual displays and cues to convey information quickly and effectively.

Research commissioned by 3M highlights the power of visuals to improve learning and information retention. The study found that visual aids can enhance learning by up to 400%, and humans process visuals approximately 60,000 times faster than text. Moreover, individuals tend to remember only about one-fifth of what they hear. These findings emphasize the effectiveness of visual management in conveying information and ensuring that it is easily understood, remembered, and acted upon.

A critical aspect of visual management is visual metrics. Visual metrics are key performance indicators (KPIs) presented in a visual format. They provide a clear and concise way to monitor and evaluate performance, enabling teams to identify areas for improvement and track progress toward goals. Visual metrics can be displayed through various representations, such as charts, graphs, or dashboards.

The Goal of Visual Management in Factories

Visual management serves three primary objectives: aiding in work planning, improving operations, and highlighting problems. While there are numerous visual metrics and displays that can be employed, they should all align with these overarching goals.

Work planning is done with visual boards that provide a clear overview of tasks, ongoing projects and workflows. By visually representing the work, teams can promote better coordination and planning to prioritize tasks, set realistic deadlines, and foster consensus.

Improving work is another crucial goal of visual management. Visual aids enable teams to identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and other areas needing improvement. These tools allow teams to adjust their daily tasks dynamically, collaborate across departments to troubleshoot production issues and drive continuous improvement. Observable transparency and accountability work to cultivate a culture of agility, target achievement, and ongoing optimization.

One of the most significant advantages of visual management is its ability to help teams expedite problem detection and determine what needs attention. Visual boards provide a more digestible representation of performance metrics and critical indicators. Think stoplights (the classic green-yellow-red color scheme) and emojis (smiley or frowny faces) to represent information at a glance. By readily making this information available, teams can swiftly identify deviations from expected standards or targets. This proactive approach to problem-solving ensures that issues are promptly addressed, preventing them from escalating into more significant problems.

The Future of the Ubiquitous Whiteboard

Whiteboards, often called Lean Manufacturing Boards, have long been used in the manufacturing industry for visual management. They offer a cost-effective and flexible solution that can be quickly customized and implemented without significant time or financial investment. They often display a graphical visual representation of processes, assigned tasks, and key performance indicators.

However, a recent poll conducted by Poka’s product team revealed an emerging trend in the industry. More manufacturers expect to transition from physical whiteboards to digital visual management solutions. They reported the main challenges associated with physical boards being the manual updating of information and the absence of data history. They find the manual revision process time-consuming and that it leads to outdated or inaccurate information, which hampers real-time decision-making and analysis.

Using Visual Management in Daily Activities

Visual management tools play a vital role in enhancing daily planning and issues management within organizations. By effectively incorporating these tools, teams can gain visibility, better prioritize tasks, and ensure smooth operations. Here are some key aspects to consider when integrating visual management into daily activities:

Issue Management and Visibility

Operators often are encouraged to log every issue they encounter, which can create too much volume for a physical Kanban board. Instead, a digital issues management dashboard equipped with colour-coded priority rankings, easily visible current status updates, and filtering options is better suited. This digital dashboard provides real-time visualization of shop floor problems, creating visibility into ongoing issues and their statuses, enabling teams to prioritize and address them efficiently.

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Moreover, visual management breaks down silos between departments by facilitating easy communication and collaboration. Operators, as the eyes and ears of the shop floor, can now seamlessly interact with other teams, such as Maintenance or Quality. Operators can capture and share real-time information through digital tools, fostering better cooperation and communication.

Additionally, visual management contributes to a decrease in the number of recurring issues. As teams actively address and resolve problems, they can implement improvements and raise standards, resulting in more reliable and optimized operations. The source of recurring problems are identified and eliminated, extracting the proverbial thorn in the lion’s foot. No more daily band-aid changes to mitigate annoying side effects. In turn, this helps further lower the total volume of reported issues.

Daily Planning Sessions

Daily planning sessions, such as daily huddles, shift start-up meetings, or all-hands meetings, are core practices for facilitating information flow and escalating problems. Factories can have as many as 20 tier meetings a day, beginning at the operator level and rising up through leadership and across departments. In preparation for each meeting, information has to be collated and updated. For companies relying on physical visual management tools, this leads to constant rework to keep the information up to date, as it is continuously referenced throughout the day.

At the operator level, these meetings involve discussing shift objectives and addressing issues logged by the previous shift. Production line supervisors hold tier meetings to discuss line-specific issues and interact with departments like Safety or Quality. These meetings serve to escalate important matters, review performance against objectives, assess overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), and identify any abnormalities or pending actions.

Daily management functions aim to consolidate and streamline these meetings into a cohesive system. A significant amount of information reviewed during tier meetings, including safety and quality metrics, centerlining, CIL (Clean, Inspect, Lubricate), abnormalities, preventative maintenance, 5S, scheduling, planned and unplanned losses, and staffing, is traditionally gathered from forms completed by operators. A daily management system digitizes this information, making it accessible on dashboards and open issue logs.

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Line supervisors benefit from these digital dashboards, which provide a comprehensive overview of pending, completed, and overdue forms, tasks, and issues. This empowers supervisors to take appropriate action in real-time without the need for manual data entry. The goal is to facilitate the decision-making process for line supervisors by providing a single-click view of the previous 24 hours' activities, highlighting missed tasks, prioritization needs, and discussion points for tier meetings.

Improving communication, efficiency, and decision-making across all levels of the organization leads to fewer and shorter meetings. This not only saves valuable time but also enables faster issue resolution. A case study with Plastico Dise demonstrated how implementing digital visual management tools resulted in far less meetings and reduced resolution times, ultimately increasing overall efficiency.

The Virtuous Circle

Poka’s digital visual management capabilities exist as part of a comprehensive platform aimed at turning every issue in production into an opportunity to learn and improve. What that means is Poka’s streamlined workflow ensures that issues are promptly identified, captured, prioritized, and resolved, and the learning becomes part of an updated standard that is communicated to all relevant team members.. This begins with using forms as part of standard work, such as when workers conduct daily tasks like 5S or CIL checklists. Automated forms can proactively identify potential issues, and if any deviations are flagged, they can be escalated as tickets.

Within the issues management dashboard, users can track and monitor the status of problems from detection until resolution. The dashboard provides visibility into resolution lead times, allowing teams to stay ahead of the ticking countdown clock if target resolution times are same-shift or same-day. Users can comment on issues, create tasks and assign due dates, and receive notifications on tickets, ensuring accountability and proactive follow-up on ongoing tasks.

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Digital visual management tools facilitate a virtuous circle of problem identification, swift resolution, visualization, and learning. The data collected from issues helps identify trends, such as recurring problems at specific workstations, which can prompt an update to standards, a review of training and competencies or machine repairs. Categorizing and tagging issues enable the visualization of problem types, aiding in trend analysis. Poka’s simplified dashboard focuses on essential information to drive the production line. It can be displayed on monitors directly on the shop floor, ensuring live data visibility for the entire team and fostering team accountability.

“How do you make the time of the plant manager as effective on the shop floor as possible? Effective means connecting with his team. Well, to talk about problems, and issues, and things that the operators are seeing. And that stuff needs to be visualized. I believe that visual management and controls on the shop floor are an essential way to define what the limited time with a plant manager on the shop floor should be. That's how I connected it to Poka.” Marcin Szczelkun, Continuous Improvement Director, Bunge.

Conclusion

In conclusion, visual management, especially when supported by digital tools, revolutionizes manufacturing operations and improves cross-organizational information flow by reducing the need for tier meetings. A good visual management tool must help plan work, improve processes and detect problems. Factory whiteboards will eventually go extinct, replaced by digital visual management dashboards that don’t require manual updating or lose important historical information with the swipe of a fuzzy eraser.

Unlocking the Power of Visual Factory Management: Techniques to Streamline Processes, Improve Communications and Resolve Issues Faster