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Visual Management: Enhancing Lean Excellence with Kanban, 5S, and more lean practices

Lean management has become a buss word in industry. In this blog, we will throw light on its introduction, benefits, core principals and challenges faced by the company while effective implementation of Lean management.

Lean management is a systematic approach to running an organization by continuously improving processes and eliminating waste. Originating from the Toyota Production System, it focuses on creating value for the customer while minimizing resources, time, and effort.

Benefits of Lean Management
  • Increased Efficiency: By eliminating waste and optimizing processes, organizations can achieve higher efficiency and productivity.
  • Improved Quality: Continuous improvement and error-proofing lead to higher quality products and services.
  • Reduced Costs: Streamlined processes and reduced waste result in lower operational costs.
  • Greater Customer Satisfaction: By focusing on value from the customer’s perspective, lean management ensures that customers receive high-quality products and services that meet their needs.
  • Enhanced Employee Engagement: Lean practices often involve employees in problem-solving and improvement processes, leading to higher engagement and job satisfaction.
    • Core Principles of Lean Management
    1. Value: Define what constitutes value from the customer’s perspective. Only activities that directly contribute to this value are retained.
    2. Value Stream: Map out all the steps in the value stream and identify which steps add value. Eliminate or reduce steps that do not add value.
    3. Flow: Ensure that the value-adding steps flow smoothly without interruptions or delays. This requires streamlining processes and removing bottlenecks.
    4. Pull: Produce only what is needed when it is needed. This is in contrast to push systems where production is based on forecasts.
    5. Perfection: Continuously strive for perfection by seeking to improve processes and eliminate waste. This involves a culture of continuous improvement (Kaizen).
    Key Concepts and Tools
  • Waste (Mu da): Anything that does not add value to the product or service from the customer’s perspective. Lean identifies seven types of waste: defects, overproduction, waiting, non-utilized talent, transportation, inventory, motion, and extra-processing.
  • 5S Methodology: A workplace organization method that includes five phases: Sort, Set in order, Shine, Standardize, and Sustain. This helps create a clean, organized, and efficient workspace.
  • Kaizen: A philosophy of continuous improvement involving everyone from management to workers. Small, incremental changes regularly lead to significant improvements over time.
  • Kanban: A visual tool for managing work as it moves through a process. Kanban boards use cards to represent work items and columns to represent each stage of the process, ensuring a visual workflow.
  • Just-In-Time (JIT): A production strategy that strives to improve business return on investment by reducing in-process inventory and associated carrying costs.
  • Poka-Yoke: A mistake-proofing approach to prevent errors by designing systems that make it difficult or impossible to make mistakes.
    • Typical Challenges for Lean Management
  • Cultural Change: Shifting to a lean culture requires significant changes in mindset and practices, which can be challenging to implement and sustain.
  • Sustaining Improvements: Continuous improvement requires ongoing effort and commitment, which can be difficult to maintain over the long term.
    • How Visual Management can support encountering these challenges??

    Initially bringing in cultural change and Sustaining Improvements after implementation are the main challenges leading to ineffective implementation of lean management. Encountering these challenges need the change in mind-set across all the levels within the organization. Periodic trainings, Regular system monitoring are the solutions. But again, effect of these solutions is temporary and there is no assurance that all the team members including the newly joined employees are covered every time. That generates a need of developing a permanent solution.

    Visual management is recognised to be the most effective solution building a long-lasting impact than other ways of creating awareness. Appropriate and simple displays including policies, procedures, awareness creating posters and signs can contribute well as those are at site 24 hrs and are visible to all. Visual management is the best communication media which can create awareness on lean practices and also the discipline / protocols to be followed at respective stages.

    VisualMitra, an India based company is instrumental in developing a module named “FVM – Facility Visual Management” which is a complete end to end solution towards building up effective visual management at any facility. Their experts visit the facility and identify all the appropriate visuals to be displayed at various locations within the premises. VisualMitra team further works on designing and also installation of the displays to bring in change in culture enhancing effectiveness of lean management.

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    lean visual managment Visual Management Visual Management Boards visual management survey

    Visual Management, a Way of Life

    Dear people, we as human beings have changed a lot in the past 20 years. Due to advances in the technological field, most of the members of the existing generation have started using mobile phones between the years 2000 to 2010. The use of mobiles has increased with an exponential speed in the past decade and we have started experiencing an 8-year-old using a mobile phone and understanding most of its features.

    Generations are becoming smart and they are always in the hunt for easy ways to get their work done real quick and efficiently. Sometimes the bigger problems have easier solutions and all it takes is just a little brainstorming about that problem. Such technological advances and brainstorming have developed a number of lean management tools such as visual management systems.

    As a result of this technological development, we have started experiencing the “Magic of Visual Management” in our daily life. Now you must be thinking what is visual management? To understand the visual management systems one needs to think about the quantum of images and videos we see per day. The quantum will not be less than 500 images/videos per day. Our brain is also getting developed in such a way that we understand the visual things faster than any other communication media.

    It is said that “Human brain processes visual memory 60,000 times faster than auditory memory”. Also, it is noted that “65% population is Visual Learners”. By virtue of this, it is obvious that understanding the message or a subject will be better if it is communicated by means of images, colors and minimal text. In our words, it is by means of “Visual Management”.

    One needs to understand and accept that Visual Management is the most effective method of communication in every field, may it be educational, industrial or even business management. In the current scenario, every individual should give emphasis on how things can be made easy & effective by means of Effective Visual Management systems. For example, a visual management board can be used to display important data that would be accessible to all with minimal efforts.

    Benefits of Visual management board

    It is time-saving, faster problem-solving, improved work efficiency, better accountability, improved team performance, other visual management tools include making use of posters, charts, signs, etc. for lean management processes. Also, floor marking tapes are considered as one of the most important visual management tools.

    5s visual management and Gemba walks are one of the favored lean visual management techniques by most of the leaders. 5s visual management and Gemba walks are focused on achieving cost cutbacks, waste termination, zero defects, safety enhancements, and accident reductions which makes them most preferred and vastly used visual management tools.

    The implementation of lean visual management is a science. There are multiple parameters such as the selection of colors, images, text and also the media/material for display, size of the display and location of the display. We have experienced at many facilities that the visual management is not very effective although efforts have been taken to display posters, signs & whiteboards.

    This is because the selection of the visual management parameters was not taken into consideration while designing the complete lean visual management arrangement at the facility. These visuals must be well designed for easy prediction of the display also it must be well engineered and standardized to make the visual more effective and efficient. Hence it is concluded that the science behind the various displays at the facility shall be followed to create positive and desired results from the effective visual management systems.

    Visualmitra LLP is a Mumbai based company, offering visual management services to almost all sectors of the industries & businesses they are known for the successful execution of various projects pan India and even abroad. Their visual management experts visit the facility and prepare a detailed and comprehensive project report considering all the necessary parameters for effective management.

    Many facilities including multinational companies, business units, commercial establishments, warehouses have availed their end to end services to make their facility safe & productive. All these companies have experienced “Change in Culture” at their facilities. Most of the developed countries have endorsed the positive results of effective lean visual management at the facility. Now it’s a time for India to understand and implement the system to make the facility visually compliant for better results in the individual area of operations. All the best!!

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    lean methodology lean visual managment Visual Management

    Powerful Lean Visual Management Tools for your Organization

    We are always surrounded by Visual management tools but they are so common, we might not even think about them. Most common example is when a car is about to run out of fuel, a light will blink and alert you about the problem. Next is, a message waiting indicator on your desk phone. Human brain can quickly process these visual clues and use the information to make decisions.

    Lean principles use these powerful tools for management and improvement. When an organization is striving for continuous improvement can benefit with lean management.

    What do Visual Management Tools Do?

    We’ll get into the specifics of some of the most popular Lean visual management tools in a minute, but it is useful to point out that visualization has some important goals. The following are the tools:-

    • Share Information with Others
    • Communicate Standards
    • Enforce the Standards
    • Bring Attention to Irregularities
    • React to Irregularities When They Happen
    • Prevent Irregularities from Occurring

    Lean organizations focus on delivering maximum value to the customer by eliminating waste and creating processes that produce consistent, predictable results. Following visual management tools are used to achieve those aims.

    Kanban

    Kanban is a visualization technique which is designed to manage and enhance workflow. It uses visual cues to balance demand with available capacity and remove system-level bottlenecks. Work items are represented visually to give participants a view of progress and process, from start to finish – in the form of a Kanban boards.

    When the workflow is in visualized form and work in progress is limited, any interruption in flow can be identified, targeted, and resolved before a backlog happens or grows too large. This is important in all industries, as backlogs cause more investment, create prioritization conflicts, and increase the distance to customer value.

    Toyota first used the Kanban approach to limit work in progress and minimize inventory using cards to indicate that the inventory needed to be replenished. Today, many organizations use Kanban boards to represent workflow and reduce friction within processes.

    5S Technique

    5S Technique is a workplace organization method that uses a list of five Japanese words which have been translated into English as “Sort,” “Set In order,” “Shine,” “Standardize” and “Sustain”. 5S is also termed as “visual control, visual workplace, or visual factory.”

    5S is not simple housekeeping, but concentrating on reducing waste, based on maintaining the standards and the discipline required to manage the organization – all achieved by upholding and showing respect for the workplace. In a well organised workplace, it becomes easy to recognize when something is missing or out of place.

    Implementing one or all of these techniques, adding the element of visual management, especially when assisted by technology, will help any organisation to accelerate the pace of improvement, reduce irregularities, and keep everyone engaged.