Today we piloted a standardized full facility gemba walk - not just the warehouse, not just As our facility is 130,000 sqft in size, the walking alone is 7 minutes of that hour. Some visits we cut short(er), some we took a bit longer. We tried to give each stop, all 10 of them, primarily at team visual management/huddle boards, a solid five minutes each at least.
Some visits were full of suggestions for the owners, some VM boards were pretty solid and even helped the walkers on determining actions required for themselves. We left post-it notes with our ideas or observations on these boards. We called these "Love notes" - hoping to have a little fun with it all and help everyone take a fresh look at their VM boards. It's easy to get complacent after all. Sometimes it takes the help of others to see what isn't working - or what just isn't conveying the message you expected. Heck, my boards were desperately in need of refreshing.Our goal with developing this gemba walk is to share the best practices between all of these departments. Eventually, once we develop the habit of the weekly walk, the group of walkers can be extended to include members of our senior management team, some of whom rarely get to these other parts of the facility.
Information is great but only if it's current and relevant. I'm OK with backwards looking data, to show historical performance. But let the information tell me a story about how well we are doing, so I can tell the team "great job!". Or where the problem areas may be, so I can do something about them.
AMac
No comments:
Post a Comment