What is a Gemba Walk?

Gemba walk , in simple words is a form of “Management by Walking Around” (MBWA).  This is a very powerful tool as it is based on the fundamental principles of lean known as the ” 3G’s of lean ” as listed below. Gemba walk provides a first-hand unpolluted information about your Processes, Products and People.

3 G’s of Lean

Gemba – “The actual place”. This a place of actual work where the value is created

Gembutsu – “The thing”. Products or things which we are interested to improve.

Genjitsu – “The facts”. The real facts that are happening at the place of interest

I like to call Gemba walk as Management by walking around because it allows you to do just that. A 15 minutes Gemba walk has proved to be more effective in resolving flow interrupters for delivery than having hour long status meetings far away in the comfort of the office with unreliable data. When you are out there on the Gemba looking at the actual process, products and people responsible for them, there is no doubt about anything ,  no one can fabricate false information, you can interact with the process owner to resolve problems more quickly. This also helps all the Line Managers to align their priorities to solve problems for more efficient flow of the products through the value stream.

Few things to keep in mind to make this a successful tool:

- Have a clear theme and agenda for the walk

- prepare a list of questions to ask

- Setup a display board for each workstation which help process owner to answer question you will be asking

-  Have the top-most management do Gemba walk along with you at least during the initial phase, that way everyone know that we are serious about improvement

- Be disciplined never miss the gemba walk

- Make sure resources are made available to resolve issues discovered during the walk

- make sure the account abilities are clear and everyone responsible completes their task

Gemba walk  will be a good management tool as long as you use it properly. It can be used to serve various purposes. I will share more about my experiences in later posts. Till then if you have any questions or you need to know  anything  in particular about its implementation and application…. just leave a comment below.

Actually a post “Learning to Learn” by Evan Durant inspired me to write this. This topic has always intrigued me and have read my share blogs posts, books to satisfy my curiosity. I would like to share my experiences and experiments on this process and learn what others have done. I will briefly explain my philosophy and tools to slay this dragon!

The Philosophy of Learning:

Learning is not possible unless there is creative tension. Imagine a place where everyone agrees, they will never learn new things and grow. For this to be possible you need the right people and right environment. Right people are the one who questions the status quo and are not afraid constructive criticism. This is a tough team to have they will always keep you on your toes. The environment or conditions that will lead to learning  are explained more in detail in my post “The 8 Fold Path”. This is just my opinion but I believe most learning system will be composed of one or more similar building blocks.
The Tools:

Task Standard work & Leader Standard Work: We need to be able capture knowledge at process level and then link it to peoples tasks. The combination of task and leader standard work helps to achieve this. We had started to use this tools out of necessity for standardizing our tasks but learned it can be a effective learning tool when a new person joins a team or even for cross training. Task Standard work ensures all the tasks required to sustain a process are understood and captured thus providing reference point for future improvements. Leader Standard work ensures these tasks are performed by responsible individuals.In case of new person or cross training leader standard work helps the individual to do things religiously on daily basis till becomes a habit that helps him/her to do the job. The right habits helps develop right culture. Thus these tools if used properly can used to help people learn the culture of the organization. They are also good catch-ball mechanisms between the trainer and trainee.

More reading: “Leader Standard Work” , “Task Standard Work”

Gemba Walk: This is yet another catch-ball mechanism and very effective to get whole people on the team to align their thoughts and understanding. We cannot transfer what is there in our mind to somebody else’s  in an instant. We have to reinforce the idea again and again and how it implies in different scenarios till the other person understands its application and corrects any misunderstanding under the observation of the trainer. Every time the learner makes mistake the trainer is there to correct his path and realign their understanding. Several iterations of this during the gemba walks helps  everyone to learn  and align their ideas.

A3 Problem Solving: This is by far the most effective tool in teaching problem solving. It forces the learner to go through the PDCA cycle helping him to learn the systematic problem solving using scientific method. Second, the  catch-ball mechanism by which I mean every time the learner proposes a solution the trainer can send it back asking for  necessary fixes, and this cycle can go on till the best solution is reached.

Internal Training : We used to have weekly 30 min training for all the managers where anyone propose a training topic and present it. Mostly it would be one point lessons and sometimes games to show how one piece flow is better than batch. It was a fun way to learn and also a good opportunity for new managers to learn the skills of teaching in a safe environment.

Whatever you decide is your philosophy of learning or your tools, always remember to standardize the learning process so that any ineffective processes or steps can be improved or eliminated. We cannot learn the learning process without knowing what it is.

Few months back I had an opportunity to attend one our customers “Training and Supplier trade show”. The event is held annually so that all the buyers and managers get to meet all the suppliers and see their offering and collaborate to find better solutions.  They must have realised long time ago, for a event like this it is hard to make everyone work seriously with their vendors. For most people in these events it is a break from the routine, free travel at company’s expense free food and drinks! especially the free drinks . Working on serious issues like a cheap alternative for current service from a vendor is last thought on anyone’s mind.

But the event was not even close to this, surprisingly everyone was very seriously involved and they were enjoying it both the Company’s employees and also the vendors. The mantra for this was an ingenious way of integrating game mechanics into the purpose of the event. Concept was simple there were teams of  which consisted certain business units and randomly chosen vendors.It had very common game elements like points, leader boards and Big Prizes.Vendors had to come up with 3 points defining how they help the company through their service and products. Employees got points by going to each booth finding out what are these 3 points and remembering them. More booths you visit more points your team gets, which was continuously updated on the leader board. The winning team got an actual NASCAR race car body shell and bragging rights for the whole year. It did not matter how valuable the points are or what you will do with car body shell, everyone was motivated to do exactly what the event intended to do: Interact and know more about your vendors, find their offerings and often quest for more points led to discovery of new vendors or services.

Games have very powerful effect on motivating people. A simple but well designed game can keep people engaged and aligned towards the goal. I remember a year ago when we started a 5S reward system it were these same elements of points, leader board and a prize that kept people motivated facilitating change in effective manner.

This is a scene at most of the businesses where the Business goals very rarely affect the day to day processes that run the organisation or any changes in the process realign the goals to new scenario.  People are usually left on their own to figure their way out of this situation. Here Business planing is considered as an annual activity and once done is set in stone or worse just completely forgotten during the rest of the year only to review again at the end of the year. You know you are one of them if you look back at last year and blame each other or somebody or something  for not reaching your targets.

For a business to achieve its goals and be successful it needs to agile and continuously in sync with changing environments within and outside the organisation.

To achieve this agility we need to have a system which aligns our People to Processes, which in turn are aligned to our Business goals on Day to Day basis. It works both ways as everything works in sync like gears where change in one gears rotation or speed will proportionally change the others.

Visually this looks very simple but practically implementing this is a challenging but I believe is not impossible. Especially if you already have tools to standardize processes (Task Standard Work) and People ( Leader Standard Work ). We will discuss this more in detail in the next post on this topic.

so-called wise men thought themselves wise and yet were not, he himself knew he was not wise at all which, paradoxically, made him the wiser one since he was the only person aware of his own ignorance…. -about Socrates on Wikipedia

Paradoxes of Socrates have always intrigued me. Though I have not not read his work through  words of Plato I have come to appreciate the socratic method that we often use to find the root cause.

I always wondered how and why people behave and do the things they do….. one might think the answer is very complicated  and you need to very intelligent person to find it or there is no answer at all. But now it feels like the answer is so simple that we totally ignore it. The only reason we cannot explain everything is that we don’t know all the facts. Once the facts are placed in front of us the answer will be clear to us.If we use the  Socratic approach , start by being completely ignorant about the topic of concern, eliminate the influence of assumptions and opinions which may divert us from truth.

One must always ask the most basic question ….. ” why? ” till we are convinced that we have finally found the true answer which is often buried in the details.

Application of this philosophy are plenty, the “5 Why ” often used in Lean Methodology is an good example. It is the foundation of most detective work too. But the most important is  you can use it in your day-to-day life and understand why things are happening the way they are…. helping you to be aware rather than just exist!

Having distrustful , vendors, customers and most important people within our organisation is one of the biggest waste that we don’t account for.

How is distrust wasteful? Imagine a person on your team whom you don’t trust to keep certain business secrets. Now you will always have to work extra to make sure that this person does not divulge secrets to your competitors.This unnecessary waste of time and effort would have been easily be used for more profitable purposes if there was no distrust.

Ideally an organisation  with minimal or no distrust will move faster on any change project. Thus I feel Integrity and trustworthiness are one of the important traits to look for in any team member.

As you may have noticed there are few unique types of problems which have very large impact (Financially or in some intangible way). As we get to the process level on the shop-floor we come across hundreds, if not thousands of low impact problems. If we plot all these problems we see something which look like a Long Tail distribution.

Though the solution of the individual problem in the “Fat Tail” may have a small impact, but together they contribute to the largest portion of the gain if solved.

How do we solve so many problems simultaneously without overloading our resources. This makes us realize the importance of empowering each and every person to solve their problem. What ever tools you use, like A3 , 5 Why, Ishikawa Diagram,  etc. to train should be aimed to decentralize the problem solution. When we have each and every person in the organisation trained in this manner it creates a synergistic effect allowing to solve several problems large and small simultaneously.

How many times have you sucessfully implemented change using lean tools only to realize, after few weeks or months, that the manager and other people  have either reverted back to the old methods or have found ways to circumvent the newly established methods.

We learned the hard way that lean transformation cannot be supported and sustained with  traditional management system

Most of the times traditional management is results driven and may not focus on the process. Thus there is no inherent  motivation for the manager to improve the process. Also when lean tools are applied  this type of management does not provide a sustainable system to integrate, improve and sustain changes with daily feedback to realign to solve problems as they arise.

The “Lean Management” provides the framework to drive the lean culture. As identified by David Mann in his book “Creating Lean Culture“, there are 4 elements that makeup the Lean Management:

1. Leader  Standard Work

2. Daily Accountability

3. Visual Controls

4. Discipline

Leader Standard Work sustains the systems integrates the changes made during the transformation process. Visual Control and Daily Accountability helps keep the process and people aligned to solve problems as they arise. The Discipline of the leader ensures that standard work is followed and the whole system works coherently.

I was reading “Audit Vs. leader Standard Work” by Mark Rosenthal and I suddenly realized what potential we have created at our work place.

Over the course of the year we have grown very fond of the audits. Especially for 5S and we are developing audits  for maintaining other lean management systems put in place. So far they worked fine and actually helped us to stay on track and also creating in culture of continuous improvement. So you may be wondering why that is bad?

As Mark explains Audits are snapshot and often people will try to fool the system to be good for the audit but bad on other days when there is no audit. Now I wondered why it was not realized at our place?

The reason for this was simple , we had unknowingly incorporated that in our Gemba Walks. This ensured continuous followup of all the set systems on daily basis. This was an important move,  addressing to issues as we walk through the workstation was part of our Leader Standard Work (LSW). This kept the systems in check on day to day basis, for example an operator was informed about parts without any designated place immediately when it was seen rather then waiting to conduct the audit.

This has inspired me to think of new system where in we will no longer need audits as we will do bit of checking everyday by enabling it through LSW of responsible people.

Some things which helps to achieve this goal :

1. Try to break down big monthly tasks into smaller weekly  tasks , similarly weekly to daily tasks.

2. Use knowledge gained from issues of shop floor modify LSW to fit systems put in place to avoid these issue in future

3. Even if you have to use audits initially , make them stricter , raise the bar up as people start getting better

4. be disciplined to resolve issues  immediately rather than waiting for the next formal  audit

I am hoping to learn more by looking at audits and leader Standard work from this Perspective and ultimately be able to stay away from audits  by taking a bite a day using the Leader Standard work.

5S is often misunderstood as just a mere housekeeping tool. Impact of having a successful 5S system is more profound than just keeping the place clean.

5S is the starting point of any lean transformation and forms a catalyst for culture of change. Due to the very visible results it makes the process of buy-in easy for both the shopfloor personnel and Management.

some of the key points why 5s forms the foundation of lean manufacturing is as follows:

• Standardisation of process provide a stable base for incremental improvement
• Visible results helps boost morale of the people who then take pride working in this area
• Is an enabler of Continuous Improvement culture
• Prepares the workplace and people for implementing other Lean tools like TPM, SMED etc.

5S implementation may sound easy but in reality it may be very complex and even more complex is how to sustain it. Not being able to sustain 5S is one of the biggest reason for failure any lean implementation project. Properly sustained 5s program helps continuously improve the workplace and shows managements commitment to the whole change process.  Leader Standard Work is one of the way to sustain 5S and new control measures developed by implementing 5S.