One of the most significant parts of Lean manufacturing is Visual Management. It is truly one of the most overlooked, but simplest tools available to manufacturers. Managing visually is the ability of a system to show the current status to anyone that stands and observes any part of the operation, within 30 seconds. It may be the production status, delivery status or a machine status. There must be indicators in place to let everyone know how things are going. Here are the basic elements of Visual Management:

Information Sharing – Simple notice boards that include graphs of performance summaries, customer surveys and key team achievements.

Standard Sharing – Sharing of standards and expectations in a visual manner, done regularly and in the same format.

Build In Standards – Sharing of standards to make it difficult to deviate from the expectations. A common example would be a Heijunka Box.

Deviation Warning – One of the most common visual management tools is a shadow board. It simply indicates where something should go or warn when something is missing.

Stopping Abnormalities –  A simple alert when an abnormality occurs and allow the issue to be corrected. They are either manual or automated signals that highlight the occurrence.

Preventing Abnormalities – These seek to prevent an issue from occurring rather than alarming when the ice occurs. Simplest solutions are the best. Airline lavatory lights are a fine example, as they illuminate when the lavatory is occupied and prevent others from attempting entry.

So, the next time you are on your factory walk, look around. Stop and observe what is really going on around you. With proper Visual Management techniques in place, you should quickly be able to grasp and understand how each area around you is performing. If you are seeing problems, who is alerted to the issue and what are they doing to correct it? If you cannot quickly understand the status of each operation quickly, then it is time to revisit your Visual Management program and strive for simplicity and clarity.

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Visual Management is one of the simplest, most effective tools of Lean manufacturing, but often overlooked. The key to success is simplicity. If anyone were to walk through your manufacturing operation, they should visually be able to understand how the operation is performing. It should be clear and concise.

Check out this educational video on Visual Management:

The post [VIDEO] The Simplicity and Effectiveness of Visual Management appeared first on 6sigma.

Roselinde Torres is a senior partner and managing director at the consulting firm, BCG. She works in the firm’s people and organization practice area. Watch her discuss what it really takes to be a great leader.

The post [VIDEO] What Does It Take to Be a Great Leader? appeared first on 6sigma.

For lean to be truly effective, it needs effective lean leadership to champion lean principles, offer guidance, and ensure that lean is being used to optimize the entire organizational system for value delivery. It requires a shift in mindset from that of a supervisor, to that of a teacher or coach. The most effective practitioners of lean leadership gently, by example, lead by ensuring that lean principles are being applied with the right goal in mind.

This is often easier said than done for some leaders. You know who they are. Micromanagers with hair-trigger tempers that run roughshod over employees in the name of productivity and results. They forget that the basic tenets of lean methodology are all about the employee or front line worker. Strength in lean depends on employees being empowered to act and be supported by lean leadership. The concepts of heavy-handed micromanagement and lean methodologies are just not compatible.

The role of lean leadership is that of a coach. Coaches align their teams around a common goal. They arm their teams with the tools for success, and encourage them to make smart decisions that will allow for sustainable, competitive growth. They give their employees more control over their work and over decisions about how work should be done, because they realize that the workforce is smarter than they are about the systems the team works on. Many enlightened organizations also find that, when empowered, the workforce can respond to situations more quickly. Empowering workers also means giving them the knowledge they need to take on the responsibility for decision-making.

Tips for Effective Lean Leadership

• Attend the Gemba – Be seen everyday and be involved. You cannot lead from your office. Spend time with employees everyday.
• Live the 5 Why’s – Understanding comes from asking why, not marking orders. Get down to the root cause and educate.
• Communication is the Key – Meet every day. It takes 10 minutes to ensure everyone is on the same page.
• Think in Value Stream – See your organization from the eyes of the customer. Focus the team on meeting takt time and when that has been met, redeploy the labor somewhere else.
• Notice and Prioritize – Pay attention and visualize the operation. What you overlook or fail to identify, is what you accept. Employees respond to what you see as important.

The post Lean Leadership: Take a Deep Breath and Let It Go appeared first on 6sigma.

The Impact on a Global Scale

Green manufacturing and clean energy are getting attention on a global scale.  The United States, Brazil and China have made new commitments to fight climate change. The United States unveiled a Clean Power Plan to reduce carbon pollution. The United Nations is taking great strides to take on climate change worldwide. All of these efforts to improve clean energy and climate change have a direct impact on manufacturing. Whether it is a reduction in auto emission standards or clean energy efforts, manufacturing will be at the forefront of the initiatives. Unfortunately, some of these initiatives have fallen short or lack support on a global scale. As an example, experts compare the current climate of 2015 China to the climate of 1974 Pittsburgh. Clearly, global creativity and cooperation is what will be required moving forward.

Green Manufacturing Gains Momentum

Green manufacturing is a good idea in terms of the environment, and also for business on a global scale. Even though new environmental regulations are cropping up around the globe, leading companies are very focused on taking the initiative. They are becoming laser focused on reducing waste and improving energy use, not because of regulation but because of the long term impact of their practices. Companies are looking at the use of energy, water and materials and how they can reduce or eliminate them from their manufacturing process. These same companies are finding that the Internet of Things (IoT) with connectivity, software improvements and innovative devices are becoming valuable tools in improving green manufacturing. These new devices and their connectivity are proving to be efficient and effective in their quality improvement initiatives. The connectivity created by the industrial Internet makes it easier to track resource consumption. When companies are reducing waste and energy in their manufacturing processes, they gain a significant awareness of the importance of green manufacturing.

The Future of Green Manufacturing

There is a serious interest and commitment to green initiatives in the global manufacturing industry. It is a key component of operating a sustainable business that helps uncover hidden in manufacturing, while creating value for the environment, the stakeholders, and the greater community both now and in the future. As leaders from around the world look at ways to reduce carbon pollution, manufacturers will make their operations more energy efficient.

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I once received a powerpoint presentation from a colleague; in the business world, powerpoint presentations are often amorously called “powerpoint decks.” Well, this deck was a huge one — 80 pages long. And, no, I didn’t read it, not one single page of it.

I am a huge fan of Edward Tufte. In his book, The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint, he explains why the widespread use of powerpoint isn’t good for any of us. He argues the following:

Powerpoint has a pushy style; it elevates format over content, turning once-informative work into a sales pitch. The result is dominance over your audience. One element that is particularly disturbing is the emphasis on byte-sized consumption: instead of writing in complete, coherent sentences, Powerpoint encourages infomercial type language and scattered thoughts.

In terms of content, Powerpoint allows ~40 words per slide; with so little information per slide, the result is the need for many, many slides — hence, the term “Deck.” Moreover, because presentations are sequential and stacked in time, it’s difficult to understand and find relationships. According to Tufte, visual reasoning works more effectively when relevant information is shown side-by-side. This is especially true when data is involved — which usually covers most business and technology presentations — because a fundamental analytical act is to make comparisons. It is difficult to make comparisons when a deck is sequential; it is better to have handouts so that the audience can compare data from one slide with another slide at their own convenience. What about placing several charts on one slide, allowing for comparison on the same slide? This can be done, but it’s difficult since there is so little space on a slide.

Continuing, Powerpoint encourages simplistic thinking; hence, content is compromised, which is very disrespectful to the audience.

Tufte concludes that presentation failure and audience boredom is a problem of content failure, not a decoration failure. If the integrity of your data is suspect and the way you present your data is over-bearing and not relevant, no matter how many clip art images or fancy colors you use will save the presentation — it’s a content failure; more decoration won’t save it. He further says that Powerpoint doesn’t respect the audience, but instead seeks to dominate them; it doesn’t encourage conversation or convey knowledge.

I am a huge fan of Edward Tufte. I agree with most of his points against Powerpoint; I do think he’s a little intense about the whole thing, but I do agree that, in terms of Powerpoint as a tool for conveying knowledge and the visual display of quantitative information, Powerpoint is a bad vehicle to use.

An Example of an Effective Display of Quantitative Information

A wonderful piece of both art and mathematics is Charles Joseph Minard’s map that portrays the losses suffered by Napoleon’s army in the Russian campaign of 1812. This map is beautiful and informative: it shows 6 variables plotted in a most informative and elegant way.

Beginning on the left at the Polish-Russian border, the grey band shows the size of the army as it invaded Russia in June 1812. Napoleon started with 422,000 men and finally reached Moscow with 100,000 men. The black band shows the army’s retreat from Moscow, finally making it back to Poland with 10,000 men. This black band is linked to the temperatures and dates at the bottom of the map.

Conclusion

What once began as a piece against Powerpoint is ending as a piece about information architecture, design, and information theory. Tufte has influenced many areas of mathematics, design, and industrial engineering. Check his works out if you haven’t yet. You’ll be better for it.

The post Powerpoint Tufte Nasa: Devoid of Meaning appeared first on 6sigma.

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Today, Seth chimes in on Powerpoint Slides, which inspired this post.

I once received a powerpoint presentation from a colleague; in the business world, powerpoint presentations are often amourously called “powerpoint decks.” Well, this deck was a huge one — 80 pages long. And, no, I didn’t read it, not one single page of it.

I am a huge fan of Edward Tufte. In his book, The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint, he explains why the widespread use of powerpoint isn’t good for any of us. He argues the following:

Powerpoint has a pushy style; it elevates format over content, turning once-informative work into a sales pitch. The result is dominance over your audience. One element that is particularly disturbing is the emphasis on byte-sized consumption: instead of writing in complete, coherent sentences, Powerpoint encourages infomercial type language and scattered thoughts.

In terms of content, Powerpoint allows ~40 words per slide; with so little information per slide, the result is the need for many, many slides — hence, the term “Deck.” Moreover, because presentations are sequential and stacked in time, it’s difficult to understand and find relationships. Accoring to Tufte, visual reasoning works more effectively when relevant information is shown side-by-side. This is especially true when data is involved — which usually covers most business and technology presentations — because a fundamental analytical act is to make comparisons. It is difficult to make comparisons when a deck is sequential; it is better to have handouts so that the audience can compare data from one slide with another slide at their own convenience. What about placing several charts on one slide, allowing for comparison on the same slide? This can be done, but it’s difficult since there is so little space on a slide.

Continuing, Powerpoint encourages simplistic thinking; hence, content is compromised, which is very disrespecful to the audience.

Tufte concludes that presentation failure and audience boredom is a problem of content failure, not a decoration failure. If the integrity of your data is suspect and the way you present your data is over-bearing and not relevant, no matter how many clipart images or fancy colors you use will save the presentation — it’s a content failure; more decoration won’t save it. He further says that Powerpoint doesn’t respect the audience, but instead seeks to dominate them; it doesn’t encourage conversation or convey knowledge.

I am a huge fan of Edward Tufte. I agree with most of his points against Powerpoint; I do think he’s a little intense about the whole thing, but I do agree that, in terms of Powerpoint as a tool for conveying knowledge and the visual display of quantitative information, Powerpoint is a bad vehicle to use.

An Example of an Effective Display of Quantitative Information

A wonderful piece of both art and mathematics is Charles Joseph Minard’s map that portrays the losses suffered by Napoleon’s army in the Russian campaign of 1812. This map is beautiful and informative: it shows 6 variables plotted in a most informative and elegant way.

Beginning on the left at the Polish-Russian border, the grey band shows the size of the army as it invaded Russia in June 1812. Napoleon started with 422,000 men and finally reached Moscow with 100,000 men. The black band shows the army’s retreat from Moscow, finally making it back to Poland with 10,000 men. This black band is linked to the temperatures and dates at the botton of the map.

There is a larger version of the map here. Many statisticians and mathematicians have also munged their own verson of Minard’s map here.

Conclusion

What once began as a piece against Powerpoint is ending as a piece about information architecture, design, and information theory. Tufte has influenced many areas of mathematics, design, and industrial engineering. Check his works out if you haven’t yet. You’ll be better for it. And, if you have to use Powerpoint, use it intelligently — in a way that actually conveys information, not just fluff.

The post Clipart Microsoft – How to Create a Dumb Presentation appeared first on 6sigma.

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The assumption — and, what empirical evidence supports — is that we react automatically to objects and spaces that we encounter.  The picture below is taken from the book Thoughtless Acts?: Observations on Intuitive Design — a highly recommended book:

Was the yellow line designed to encourage travelers to walk on its path?  Was this an unintended consequence?  In either case, we learn something substantial from the picture: people react to and adjust to their surroundings.

What types of visual cues cause you to react?  What types of visual cues could you design that encourage the desired reaction from your audience?

More articles on Genchi Genbutsu and Ethnography?

The post Reacting to Visual Cues appeared first on 6sigma.

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My wife created a wonderful job chart, which you find below:

This Job Chart is in our kitchen, where there is frequent foot traffic and where our family spends most of our time.  There are a few items I’d like to note:

• My kid’s ages are (from top-to-bottom): 9,8,7,3,3
• The Kid’s Heads: Visually representing each child with their face is much more effective than using their names.  The Kid’s Heads are laminated and have Velcro on the back, to facilitate ease-of-job-rotation.  This approach is also very environmentally friendly, since the pictures and the board are laminated — there’s no waste.
• We have jobs over 6 days — Monday through Saturday and the jobs are fixed, but the heads are rotateable.  The younger boys (the twins) rotate with each other at the bottom 2 rows — those jobs are designed for their age and ability.  The top-3 rows contain jobs for the older kids and those jobs are designed for their age and ability.
• Every Sunday, we rotate the heads for the upcoming week.

Deploying The Program

When my wife and I first met about this during our end-of-the-year meeting, we were quite excited and saw a lot of promise in helping our kids learn the value of work.

Plan:

• My wife and I first met together to discuss our goals for the year 2008 and how we could accomplish those goals and the expected outcomes at the end of 2008.  We then brainstormed all the jobs that needed to get done in our household on a daily and weekly basis.  We, then, categorized the jobs based on age and abilities of our children.  For example, we had to be sensitive to the child’s height or the size of their hand and matched the work to their physical and mental abilities.

Do:

• We gathered the family together and explained our goals and vision for 2008 as it relates to the principle of work.  I explained to the kids how important work is and I also shared my personal stories about the principle of work.  I showed encouragement and excitement to the kids and that learning the principle of work will help them “feel big” and not little anymore.
• My wife and I explained our expectations  and discussed rewards and consequences and also the start-date.
• We provided training on some jobs that the kids were not familiar with.  This is especially true for my twins, as this is their first foray into a more structured world of chores and work.

Check:

• Every night during our family prayer, we discuss how the day went and how their jobs are going.
• The 3 older kids have other diversions also like homework, piano, playing the Wii, and hanging out with friends.  We want to make sure that they can still do other stuff and not be too burdened by any single item.

Act:

• Depending on the findings during our daily discussions, then we adjust.  For some kids, they might have to double-up on work the next day so they can do homework.  We do not want to Batch work like that, but that is an option until further discussions can be had on whether there might be too much work.

Respect For The Kids

The Job Chart conveys information so that Mom and Dad don’t have to.  When Mom or Dad have to convey the information, it usually ends-up as nagging.  That approach is irritating, disrespectful, and polarizes people.  We want, instead, to teach self-reliance, demonstrate our trust in the kids, and help them grow in their own terms, but with our loving guidance.

How Can This Be Improved?

What we haven’t done yet is to provide Standard Work Cards for each job, showing in text how to do the job and also a picture of what a “good job” looks like.  One example might be to show a side-by-side comparison of a dirty toilet next to a clean toilet, with a marker on the clean toilet, indicating to the reader what the ideal finished good should look like.

Can you think of other ways could we improve?

Just So You Know

Yes, I have jobs also.  My jobs are usually of the “Ask Mom” variety.  This means that I get all the hard work, inconvenient errands, and other random but necessary to-do items.  And, yes: my wife is pretty much the best.

The post Visual Management and Self-Reliance appeared first on 6sigma.

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My daughter attempted to create a “Contact List” of people and their email addresses — mainly family members that she would like to email with.  As she created a contact, she didn’t know and couldn’t find a way to “Save” the contact she just created.  Here is what the user interface looked like:

Notice the “Save” button in the top-left corner?  Yes, it does say “Save”, but my daughter didn’t see it.  She, then, asked a very good question: “daddy, what’s the square thing next to the ‘Save’ button?”  It dawned on me that she is part of a generation that has actually never seen a Floppy Disk.  Yes — Floppy Disk — remember those?

A Dead Visual Representation of a Simple Idea

The actual gesture of “Save” work or an action is simple.  But, what made the work confusing and difficult is the icon used to represent the idea.  If the visual representation of the idea doesn’t make sense to the user or customer, then you introduce confusion, complexity, and eventually that customer might stop using the product or service.

Reflection

Representing abstract ideas, actions, or status with effective visual management is plain good ‘ol management.  In doing that, we must make sure that the icons we use to represent our ideas have to be relevant to the audience.  There is a growing generation of humans that have never seen a Floppy Disk or know what one is.

Be relevant; Connect; Be Accessible; Be Simple; Create Awareness — obeying these principles in visual management will enable the audience to better UNDERSTAND and obtain MEANING from your work.

Don’t go the way of the Floppy.

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A few months ago we adopted our baby girl, Mylie.  During that hospital experience, I had an encounter with a faucet fraught with featuritis and one that wasn’t humane and, during that same time, I noticed a piece of visual management in the hospital room that wasn’t effective in its intention to provide or share information.  This involved a sign in one of the cabinets, where the sign indicated in text the contents of the cabinet.  Below is a picture of what I saw:

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In the context of the entire cabinet, below is a picture of what a typical user might see:

The taped signage is small, doesn’t distinguish the writing from the wood-colored background very well, and is confusing since there are 3 signs on the same cabinet.

I wonder if the nurses or doctors can easily tell what is in the cabinet?  If the more seasoned hospital staff know the contents of the cabinet from experience, then I wonder if new hospital staff could easily tell what was contained in the cabinet?  My hypothesis is that new staff would have to open the cabinet in order to see what was contained inside.  If that is true, then the intention of the signage fails to meet its promise.

Why Visual Management?

As I indicated in this post regarding Visual Management and teaching kids the principle of work, effective Visual Management can be a control as well as a display:

• Visual Management as Control: As a control, effective Visual Management can prevent defects or warn of defects.  For example, the noise of metal-to-metal screeching in car brakes is a signal to change your brakes — the machine is warning the human that there is a defect (audible management).  Effective Visual Management as Control answers the question: “If I am doing something wrong, how will I know?”
• Visual Management as Visual Display: As Visual Display, effective Visual Management can aid in effective information sharing or encourage standardization in processes.  For example, a Standard Operating Procedue (Standard Work or SOP) is an instantiation of this principle.  An SOP answers the following questions: “Am I doing this right?” and “How do I know that I am doing this right?”

Back to the Hospital

The signage on the hospital cabinet was an attempt at information sharing — sharing with hospital staff the contents of the cabinet.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t effective.   Below is an example of a simple and effective Visual Management as Display (courtesy of mike):

This is a simple shadow board that displays pictures of the items.   As a display, the above is pretty good.  But, it misses the point of the principle of display.  How?  Well, a shadow board is meant to inform the human that an item is missing; which is why a simple outline of the item with text is more effective than the picture of the actual item.  Nevertheless, the above is a good attempt and a step better than the hospital cabinet.

Here is an effective and simple example of Visual Management as Display (courtesy of my friend jon miller):

The horizontal stripe across the binders presents a quick and easy way to realize and discover that a binder is missing or a binder is not in the proper sequence.  For example, if the top-left binder was on the top-right side, then the user would immediately know that it is is out of place.  This simple Visual Management technique supports the principle of informing the user if something is wrong.  It’s simple and elegant.

Back to Principles

It’s easy to get caught-up in the language and “tools” of the Toyota Production System, popularized in America as Lean Manufacturing.  But, it is about principles, concepts, and how “tools” support those principles.  The tools change and are improved, but the principles remain.

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Useful Tools for a Lean Leader

As a lean leader, you’ve probably realized long ago that applying lean methodologies to your own work is one of the best ways to ensure that the organization as a whole is on the right track. You can save a lot of time by trimming the waste in your daily processes, and nowadays, one of the best ways to do that is to rely on modern technology, and the many tools it provides.

There are certain applications that will become an indispensable part of your daily routine once you start using them, and it’s important to get a good grip on all those tools as the leader of your organization.

The best part, many of these options are Free!

Advanced communication

Applications like Slack can take team communication to the next level, and ensure that your team members can express their ideas quickly and concisely. They may not have a place in your specific organization, depending on the type of work you do, but they may still be useful on at least some levels. For example, ground floor workers most probably don’t need to spend the day updating their colleagues about their progress online. But managers and other leaders can definitely benefit from that significantly.

Track your time

Have you ever wondered just how much time you spend on each task on your computer? Time can be difficult to track when working with multiple applications, but if you use an automated time tracking tool, such as RescueTime, this will no longer be a problem. The way these applications work is that they measure the exact time you spend with each application down to the millisecond and present the data to you in a graphical format. This also includes sites you’ve visited, so you can additionally know if any process that involves a lot of web work is being a bottleneck in your daily operations.

This can also be a useful tool when you’re doing a job that you bill by the hour for, although this is probably not going to be very relevant for many leaders out there. Still, it’s a good thing to keep in mind when your company offers consulting services, even if you’re not the one providing them yourself.

Organize your data

Everyone knows by now that Excel is a great tool for storing data, but it can do much more than that. Used correctly, Excel is a powerful database that can show you some interesting relations between tables and sheets. It might take some time to get the hang of using it correctly like that and you may even need additional assistance if you’re not very tech-savvy in the first place but it’s something that can bring a huge change in the way your company works on a day-to-day basis.

There is much more you can do with those sheets as well, such as automating the data insertion and processing, but this is more specialized knowledge that requires a separate article to explore in detail. It’s definitely something you’ll want to look into if you’re serious about implementing lean into your organization though, so give it a try if you feel like you know your way around the computer.

If you don’t have access to Excel, you can download a free software, called OpenOffice Calc.

Industrial Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) is a relatively new concept that’s starting to take solid ground. It’s about using microelectronics in our everyday life, in everything from your fridge to your car. The idea is also finding applications in industrial environments, and many organizations have started to make their machines interconnected and even intelligent to some level. For example, assembly line machines may be able to communicate with each other, allowing each machine to pick a task from a pool to perform, optimizing the operation of the production line as a whole. It can be a bit of a costly investment at first, but it’s definitely worth the consideration in the long run. Expect to see more and more software programs in the future related to IoT.

Control your tasks with kanban boards

One of the more popular tools for minimizing the number of tasks in your queue (to stay focused on keeping tasks moving forward), many companies are creating kanban boards. These boards help teams and individuals make difficult decisions about what to focus on, and these tasks get placed into the Work In Progress (WIP) column to be worked on. Nothing new can be added to the list until something is completed, or the tasks are reprioritized. There are two popular software packages you can try out, Trello and KanbanTool.

Conclusion

We’re barely scratching the surface here, as there is a lot more you can do with modern technology to get the most out of your organization’s work. As long as you’re curious and keep looking for opportunities to reduce waste and keep everything moving in a direction of constant improvement, you should be able to see some amazing results with relatively little effort thanks to modern tools.

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Successfully Integrating 5S into a Modern Office Environment

5S is a practical approach to organizing a modern working environment, and it can be highly useful in a variety of different situations. It originated in Japan, much like many other prominent methodologies in the lean family, and it’s focused on ensuring that work can be done as efficiently as possible, identifying and removing waste while focusing on the tools and processes that are truly valuable.

Meaning and implementation

The name of 5S comes from the Japanese names of five principles, although their English names have been translated in a way that preserves the acronym as well. They are sort, set in order, shine, standardize, sustain.

• Sort: it’s important to keep a tidy and organized workspace, and the employee should dedicate a good amount of time from their daily routine to that. All unnecessary items and other form of clutter should be taken away as soon as possible, and they should never be allowed to accumulate under any circumstances.

This also applies to tools that are currently not being used, as well as already completed products that are awaiting transportation to another node of the manufacturing chain. If something cannot be cleared right away, it should ideally be left in a dedicated zone that doesn’t obstruct the worker’s routine.

• Set in order: similar to the first point, but with a different focus. This one is about ensuring that you can reach any desired element of a given set with minimal effort. If you always put your wrenches in order, you’ll know that number 14 comes after 12, and you will spend less time sorting through the toolbox looking for the right piece.
• Shine: a clean workspace is just as important as a tidy one, and 5S pay special attention to that aspect of daily work. Cleaning has another useful purpose too it can give the employee an opportunity to take a look around and figure out if there is any clutter that needs to be removed. 5S realizes the close connection between maintenance and cleaning, but assigns each one its own specific step in the process to keep everything streamlined and accessible.
• Standardize: everything that happens often and in a predictable manner should be made as standardized as possible. Those standards should then be maintained at high levels whenever possible, and the whole organization should contribute to their development. Ideally, you’d have the entire process of the company standardized from start to finish, but that’s usually not very feasible, so you have to go with a middle-ground solution.

As long as you’ve followed the previous steps and everything is arranged and tidied up though, there should be no reason to have any difficulty implementing this particular step of the process. If anything, implementing standards should become much easier once you’ve started to see some patterns emerge from your previous efforts. You’d be surprised how much you can learn about the way the company works from applying those principles.

• Sustain: last but not least, it’s important to be able to run your business in a sustainable way. This concerns not only your own operations, but the environment and other companies on the market as well. You have to be in a good position towards everyone around you, otherwise you’re going to run into conflicts sooner or later. It’s not difficult to run your business in a way that works well for everyone, and it will even benefit you in the long run too. It does take a lot of discipline though, and additionally, the company will likely have to go through multiple audits to ensure full compliance. But in the end, it will be a good effort with a justified reason.

5S in the digital world

In today’s work environment, we continue to move towards the paperless office, where everything is digital. The 5S approach can be applied to your electronic files using these same steps

• Sort out the files you no longer need
• Set in order the files in a logical manner, so you can’t them much easier
• Shine your disk drives and networks, so they are in the best working condition to run at peak performance
• Standardize the folder and file names to make it easy for others to find them
• Sustain the effort so you are continually deleting and archiving files as you go

Conclusion

The 5S method can be highly effective in ensuring that your company is moving towards a common goal that unites everyone within it, and that you’re prepared for the future too. It takes some effort to get everything in place, but once you’ve got the ball rolling, it will be a very smooth experience from then on. Of course, you’ll also want to ensure that the 5S process is being followed regularly and not just implemented once, but that falls under the category of discipline.

Learn more about 5S >>>

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What Is Overall Equipment Effectiveness?

In lean manufacturing, one of the critical variables that should be monitored in the productivity of the organization is the Overall Equipment Effectiveness, or OEE for short. It’s a measurement of the overall efficiency of the company with regards to its output, identifying if there is any waste across the different levels of the hierarchy, taking the quality of the final output into consideration.

This is a great metric for identifying the “hidden factory.” A company may appear to be operating efficiently at first glance, but OEE will quickly expose the waste and opportunities. This is what makes it such a popular methodology.

In other words, OEE indicates how well the company is able to put all of its available resources to use (with no downtime) while maintaining flawless quality of the final product. Clearly, 100% resource utilization at any moment, combined with a 100% product validation rate, is an impossible metric to achieve. However, it’s still important to strive for it as much as possible, and that’s one of the key underlying concepts in any lean organization.

How does one calculate OEE?

The specific measurements that will be used to identify your company’s OEE depend on the kind of work the company does, but the general principle is that OEE is the ratio between the amount of time the company is able to be in full production mode, versus the planned full production time.

The basic nature of this measurement means that it’s going to be somewhat imprecise unless the company has advanced analytics in place that track all sorts of metrics. Figuring out where those analytics should be targeting their data collection is not easy, and comes with a lot of experience in the company’s line of work.

That’s why it’s important that OEE measurements are handled by experienced professionals with enough experience in both the company’s own structure, as well as lean practices in general. Otherwise, the whole process might end up being driven by incorrect assumptions, leading to compounding problems down the line.

In most general cases, OEE is split into three components that are calculated separately, with the final result depending on all three: Availability, Performance, and Quality.

• Availability is the measure of how close to 100% resource utilization. In other words, it measures the proportion of downtime vs uptime in the production process. If you have a machine scheduled for 480 minutes a day, but there is 60 minutes of unplanned downtime, and 20 minutes of planned downtime, then the machine is available (480-80 = 400) 400 out of 480 minutes each day, or 83.33%
• Performance indicates how well the machine operates against its designed speed. This can be difficult to quantify or determine, so often the unknown losses are assigned into performance loss. If you knew that the machine should be able to make 3000 parts per hour, but only 2900 are produced, then the performance would be 2900/3000 = 93.33%
• Quality, as the name implies, shows the quality of the final output. This takes into account broken/defective products, as well as those that didn’t make it to the final output stage for whatever reason. Of the 2900 parts that were produced, if only 2750 were deemed “good”, then the quality would be 2750/2900 = 94.8%

To calculate OEE, multiply all three percentages together…

• Availability= 83.3% (0.833)
• Performance=93.3% (0.933)
• Quality=94.8% (0.948)
• OEE= 73.7% (0.737)

Splitting internal performance and quality

An important point to get across when it comes to OEE measurements is that there must be a clear distinction between the company’s internal performance, and the quality of the final output. These two are often confused, leading to incorrect measurement results when analyzing the current OEE.

In other words, sometimes a company might operate nearly perfectly on the inside, but still produces bad results. Without proper OEE Measurement practices, the leadership might falsely conclude that flaws in the internal processes are to blame for the poor output quality (when it could be related to something completely different, such as a scheduling conflict with an external partner).

What’s considered a good OEE range?

As we pointed out above, 100% OEE is an ideal value that’s only used as a benchmark for real results. While it’s not possible to achieve that in any realistic scenario, it’s still useful to look at the efforts required to reach that 100% (theoretically), as this can help identify the direction the company should move in.

Generally, most world-class companies around the world are able to achieve an OEE of at least 85% with significant dedication and effort. That’s considered a good realistic measure, although it’s still relatively difficult to attain for most companies without adequate preparation and constant investments into improvement.

An average company’s OEE is more likely to be in the 50-60% range. That’s not a bad measure in any way, even though it might seem like the company is dealing with significant amounts of waste. While that’s technically true, it’s also a condition in which most companies can still see sustainable growth and keep evolving their services.

Falling below 50% is considered “room for improvement,” and signifies that there’s lots of opportunity within the way the company operates. Of course, it’s also important to ensure that the measurement processes that identify the current OEE levels actually work properly, as working with invalid data can be quite harmful. However, companies may be surprised early on when their OEE numbers are under 20%. This is not that unusual, since it is a new metric, and highlighting hidden issues in the factory. Some focus on the metric can quickly bring this up over 50%.

Conclusion

Proper OEE measurement practices, and thorough analysis of the resulting data, are a great boost to the productivity of any company. They also allow leaders to identify the actual root causes of problems, instead of trying to find a solution in the dark. The additional effort that those measurement practices require to implement is usually offset significantly by the increased quality of the company’s output, and the better productivity on the inside.

However, it’s important that those measurements are handled by competent specialists, in order to ensure that the data is being analyzed and calculated correctly, and the company isn’t looking for problems in all the wrong places.

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What Is a Cardboard City?

When designing large spaces, different issues can come up that can be caught early on in the design process, if it’s handled correctly. Various approaches have been developed to tackle this problem, and 3D renderings are often used to preview how the space is going to look, from the high-level design to the smaller details.

And yet, even modern technology can sometimes miss critical issues that other, more traditional methods are better suited for. Cardboard cities are a concept related to lean design and production, and they are larger (often full-scale) replicas of the space that’s being designed made out of cardboard and similar materials.

Benefits over other tools

A major advantage of cardboard cities over digital methods is that the customer (and designers, for that matter) can get a more hands-on preview of the final space. They will know what to expect from it in terms of features and details.

Cardboard cities are particularly useful for spotting usability problems, things that one only starts to think about once they’re actually walking through the space and getting a good feeling for it. Sitting down on a chair in a waiting room, and realizing that there is no power outlet nearby, is an actual real-life example of something that has been prevented with the use of cardboard cities.

The tool is good on its own merits, but it becomes even more powerful when combined with other types of analytical methods. Spreadsheets that cover information about the important features of each given room can serve as a great additional source of information.

When that data is evaluated by experts, in combination with their own observations from the cardboard city, interesting patterns often start to emerge. These relationships are not very easy to spot with the use of other methods for previewing a large physical space, making cardboard cities an invaluable tool in the modern world.

Of course, one should still not disregard the use of modern technology and 3D previews when developing larger spaces. Developing a cardboard city should not be mutually exclusive with other tools as we said above, they can even add to each other quite well.

Another great aspect of cardboard cities is that they are still somewhat young as a concept, and new improvements are constantly being made in that area. It’s not rare for a design using a cardboard city to come up with an innovative way to look at the data produced, making it a great field for those with a more research-oriented mindset.

An experience you can’t substitute

Above all though, cardboard cities provide something that no other method of previewing a 3D space can offer. The experience from the user’s perspective adds a lot to their final perception of the product. The fact that they’re getting a chance to take a walk through the space, before construction has even started, can create a much stronger sense of connection, adding to the satisfaction once the final layout has been finished.

This is one of the reasons why contemporary designers are flocking to the concept in large numbers, and why it will probably dominate the market for a long time to come. However, there are more practical reasons which can also be an attractive factor.

Design on a budget

When the team can’t afford to spend large amounts of money on complicated preview tools, a cardboard city can be a fantastic tool that can fit into any budget. The cost requirements are very low for most projects, even more complicated ones, and it’s also easy to implement for a variety of space layouts.

Of course, this is not a universal rule. Some types of designs will still require a larger investment, and more attention from the designer. But for the most part, using a cardboard city can allow the team and customers to get a very attractive preview of the final design, without having to worry about their expenses too much.

Making changes to the layout is also easy and inexpensive when using a cardboard city, as opposed to the complex procedures required with other types of previewing tools. This is a critical aspect to any lean design, as one must be able to accept changes to the requirements as they come in. To that end, cardboard cities can complement any design style quite well.

Conclusion

It’s never too late to jump on board the trend and explore the many reasons why cardboard cities are taking over the design world by storm. When combined with other lean design tools and methodologies, they can allow a team to complete projects at a lightning pace.

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