Jul 9 2013
Visual management as a “tier 2” tool
In the TPS Principles and Practice discussion group on LinkedIn, Emmanuel Jallas asked whether visual management was a “lever to make other tools work, or a tool by itself.”
- Visual management as embedded into other tools
- Visual management and Potemkin villages
- Visual versus verbal communication
- Visual management as part of the information system
- Japanese terms for visible management
Contents
Visual management as embedded into other tools
As I see it, visual management should be part of everything else we do, but not treated as a stand-alone topic. Visual management should be considered in the design of a plant, a production line, a supermarket, a shipping/receiving area, a crossdock, a cafeteria, a restroom, etc. It is part of setup time reduction, cell design, or kanban implementation. It make visual management a “tier 2” tool.
If, however, you try to discuss it or teach it as a stand-alone, generic subject, you quickly get dragged into what it involves in different, specific contexts. If you have a mixed group, whatever you say will only be of interest to a minority at a time. On the other hand, if you are teaching Lean Logistics, then the discussion of visual management in materials handling comes naturally.
If you write a “How to” guide, you really have to think who your intended readers are. If you write on how to design a machining cell, you know exactly who they are. And, if you do a good job of writing it, all of it will be of use to this audience.
But who is the audience for visual management? It’s everybody! But the general theory of visual management fits in a few pages. After that, you have to go to examples, and each example is for an application that is only of interest to a tiny sliver of a manufacturing organization. So maybe 1% of your How-to book is of interest to each reader, but you can’t cut any of it, because another reader’s 1% is somewhere in the remaining 99%.
By the way, people like Gwendolyn Galsworth or Michel Greif, who have written several books on visual management obviously disagree with me on this. I use their books like dictionaries, not how-to guides.
Visual management and Potemkin villages
Since visual management is, … visible, it is commonly part of the Potemkin villages put up by companies that want to look lean to outsiders. But the fakery is easy to spot when, for example, you see bins under a sign that says the area should be clear, the operators don’t know what the colors on the andon lights mean, the color codes are inconsistent across the floor, or a production monitor shows overproduction and production continues,… It does not take many discrepancies to torpedo the credibility of visual management.
Complicated color codes are a tell-tale sign that a system is not used. The andon lights I have seen in Japan have only three colors with one and only one solidly lit at a time. It’s Red, Yellow, and Green, with Red meaning that the machine is stopped, Yellow that it is available, and Green that it is working. Used consistently throughout a shop floor, it gives you an overall equipment status at a glance.
Of course, the light suppliers prefer to sell more elaborate models, but I have never met an operator who could tell me what White with blinking Blue was supposed to mean, especially when it was not consistent across machines. So, if you see that, you know that the lights are just there for decoration.
Visual versus verbal communication
Reliance on words is not recommended for an audience that does not have a common language. That is why traffic signs in Europe are mostly wordless and European car dashboards are covered with pictograms, that are sometimes but not always self-explanatory, which is why I have taken to calling them “euroglyphs.”
An American car dashboard with words is actually easier to understand, but only if you know English. Like European roads, a California production shop floor may have a work force with multiple nationalities and uneven English proficiency. As a consequence, using words for instructions or safety warnings is not much of an option.
Two resources I find helpful is thinking through these issues are usability engineering experts Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things, and Asaf Degani, author of Taming Hal.
If you include hearing, touch and smell, I suppose it should be called “sensory management” rather than “visual management.” If we use “visual management” for all forms of sensory management, what term are we going to use for what is specifically visual?
Visual management as part of the information system
The term “information system” should encompass all the means used in a plant to exchange and process information. Visible management is part of it, along all the computer applications, from CNCs, PLCs and SCADA systems to corporate servers for technical and business data. They are all components of the same information system and both are needed to run a plant.
Japanese terms for visible management
The Japanese term I have heard for visual management is ”medemirukanri”(目で見る管理), literally “management you can see with your eyes.” Mieruka (見える化) is new to me; it means “transformation into something visible.” I see it as an improvement, as it is shorter and just as self-explanatory. I suppose you could say that medemirukanri is the result you achieve and mieruka the process by which you achieve it, but I don’t see that nuance in the usage.
prodrenewables
July 9, 2013 @ 4:52 pm
Wow! thank you Michel for the extensive explanation on VMS, I always try to relate input to output, since hearing is input and output is talk. Touch is input and the reaction is output. Smell we breathe in again input and output we release, this is sensory management with respect to inputs, now when we see (visual) thats the input, what is the output? mind map is it?, from Japanese “transformation into something visible”. lets define whats the output.
My point is for all we have inputs and outputs, but for visual What is the output? we can look into VMS more as a tool to be developed rather than tier-2 tool I am not sure!.
Management Improvement Carnival #198 » Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog
August 1, 2013 @ 11:07 pm
[…] Visual management as embedded into other tools by Michel Baudin – “visual management should be part of everything else we do” […]
Management Improvement Carnival #198
August 1, 2013 @ 11:22 pm
[…] Visual management as embedded into other tools by Michel Baudin – “visual management should be part of everything else we do” […]
John Sprovieri
October 31, 2013 @ 2:49 pm
Here are four ways visuals can improve reliability and asset performance. http://bit.ly/1gfwaB9
Michel Baudin
October 31, 2013 @ 4:22 pm
Thanks for pointing out this article which shows visual management as one element of working with machines.
The examples in the photographs are the most informative part: