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Partnering July, 2022 A Lesson in Lean: Visual Management at Active EMS By Roger Gaskell, Operations Director, Active EMS V
isual Management is one of those essential elements of our work and home lives
that many of us accept without question, and may not have even noticed. But once you under- stand what is meant by visual management, you’ll be seeing it everywhere.
Visual Management? Visual management is a
way to visually communicate ex- pectations, performance, stan- dards, or warnings in a way that requires little or no prior train- ing to interpret. You may have heard the term in the context of the workplace, particularly facto-
ries, but it’s actually used in all sorts of everyday scenarios. You’ve probably used scores of visual management tools today already without giving them a second thought. There are six categories of
visual management that allow increasing control of standards, performance and quality. It starts out with simple communi- cation of facts and works up to using visual controls to prevent errors from occurring. The cate- gories are: to share information; to share standards; to build in standards; to warn about abnor- malities; and to prevent abnor- malities altogether.
Categories The first category of visual
management is to share informa- tion. This is something you will regularly see in places of work and a common example is a sim- ple notice board. Examples of visual manage-
ment you’d find on the notice board include graphs showing monthly performance sum- maries, the results of customer surveys, key team achievements and perhaps a list of suggestions from the team. Another example, and one
you may use at home too, is color coding. The most common system is the traffic light system where red is a warning, yellow means to be aware and green means every- thing is ok (Traffic lights, being a prime example). The key thing here is that everyone must under- stand what information is being communicated by the colors, without having to ask. At Active EMS all SMT
processes are linked to an inter- nal “Andon” light system giving a clear indication as to the status of the assembly lines. Definitions must be clear. If you have to ask, it isn’t visual management, it’s just decoration. Next is sharing standards.
The idea here is to communicate information, in the same way as above, but where something is done regularly and must meet a certain standard. The next logical step to shar-
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ing standards is to make it difficult to deviate from those standards. Active EMS does that in visual management by building in the
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standards. Examples at work could include templates that you could use for creating Microsoft Word or PowerPoint documents. Another common example is
a visual scheduling tool, also known as a Heijunka Box, which visually indicates what tasks or jobs should be completed when, by who, and in what order. The benefit being that there is no confusion as to what the priori- ties are, and everyone can get on with what they need to.
Warnings Shadow boards are one of
the most famous visual manage- ment tools to warn of abnormali- ties. They’re a very simple, visu- al way to indicate where some- thing should go to everyone, without prior communication. They also warn when something is missing, as there is a shadow where the item should be. However, they are not the
only form of visual management that provides a warning. Other examples include the fuel light in your car and the low battery icon on your phone. Both warn you about a problem that will occur if immediate action is not taken. Visual management can be
used where an error, abnormali- ty or problem has occurred in order to provide a warning and stop the issue from continuing. They can be manual visual
aids, or in this example a Power- Point presentation alerting the as- sembly operator to look for a prob- lem encountered in earlier batch- es. This forms part of the assem- bly instruction and is animated so is constantly alerting the operator to the issue. This element of visu- al management often goes hand in hand with other mistake proofing measures. The final category of visual
management can also be consid- ered as steps for mistake proof- ing. And some of them are so simple you’ll be surprised you never thought of them. This step seeks to prevent a problem from occurring, rather than just pro- viding information or a warning
that a person must act on. Contact: Active EMS, Unit
A5/A6 Chamberhall Business Park, Harvard Road, Bury BL9 0FU, UK % +44-161-546-3456 E-mail:
natalie@active-ems.co.uk Web:
www.active-ems.co.uk r
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