4 Quick checks to get your shop floor organized

Are you tired of looking at plans without visible actions, hearing staff stories that do not tell reality and reading presentations that don’t deliver results? If so, do the Gemba Walk: go to your shop floor and observe reality in action. Because that is the place where your resources are turned into customer value. And with a sound business model, this delivers tangible P&L results.

In this blog, I will reveal four simple questions to ask yourself while walking your shop floor. The answers provide a good insight in the effectiveness of your manufacturing process. Evaluating the questions depends on visible results, not on employee explanations. Believe what you see, not what you hear. This makes your Gemba Walk fact-based and insensitive to subjective views. Conversations on the findings are encouraged afterwards, expecting they result in improvement actions.

Four questions that reveal your level of shop floor control

Strategy sessions, operation plans, S&OP meetings; all are ineffective without basic shop floor control. If execution of operations at the physical work stream level is chaotic, meeting a higher-level plan is merely a coincidence. The level of basic shop floor control can be assessed by four guiding questions and takes the experienced eye as little as 30 minutes of your time.

#1What is the next work to take?

Observe what is the next work order after the one currently on hand. Is it displayed at the work centre, are the raw materials and input information visibly available? Has it been physically verified?

#2are we ahead or behind?

Can you see at a glimpse if the workplace right now is ahead or behind its daily schedule? Will it deliver as planned? Or will you wait until end of day and then find the excuses for not meeting customer demand? To be able to observe this simple fact requires a relative high level of shop floor control.

#3Where are our abnormal conditions?

In the most straightforward sense just observe where deviating materials are located. Off spec or questionable finished goods, not useable intermediate products and raw materials should be physically separated from good materials. And what is being done about them? A broader interpretation for this question is to also evaluate work to standards.

#4Do we solve our daily problems?

Finding answers for this fourth question requires a pretty good level of visual factory. Ideally the workplace has a display showing the reason categories for issues encountered over the last day and week, with associated action lists. Look for recent progress updates. If there is no visual factory at this level, you could also ask for the last modification made to the workplace: what, when, where, why and who. If it is unknown or over six months ago, there is probably room for improvement.

These four questions address a considerable proportion of a Lean shop floor approach. Applying them in practice can be tailored to the available time, Lean knowledge and shop floor experience. At any level, it is key to keep in mind the requirement to have visible evidence, observed directly from the shop floor. This prevents getting off track by well-meant subjective views.

Lean journey

If there is no visible information on above four checks at all, and you are caught by surprise over and over on your manufacturing performance, and you initiate improvement attempts on the same issues again and again, it may be time to start a Lean journey.

A practical start is to work your way through questions number one through four in that same order. Subsequent blog posts will dive a bit deeper per question addressed above. As for most Lean concepts, getting the basics in place is just common sense. To implement and sustain these basics proves to be a challenge in practice.

Vincent Gerdes is Senior Business Process Consultant at R&G Global Consultants in the Netherlands.