Who Are We Designing This for?

I visited an engineered wood flooring plant in Kentucky. They were losing millions of dollars annually due to poor scrap performance. After meeting with the Plant Manager and his leadership team, we took a Gemba walk to assess the current situation.

The plant was fairly well organized and clean. Everyone was following the safety rules and were intent on keeping themselves safe. How did I know this? I saw Visible Evidence of the Leadership Commitment to safety. There was signage that was aligned with actions of the leaders and all employees.

I noticed a huge amount of scrap materials in the plant. Pallets of flooring boards were lying around and it seemed like more scrap was being made by the minute. I asked how production and scrap information was tracked and was directed to a large white board mounted to the outer wall of an office.

The board displayed information on the products being produced and the hourly output of the various production lines. There was no display of scrap or quality information. I wanted to understand how the board was used. I asked the team to wait by the board until someone interacted with it.

Ten minutes later, a production operator walked up to the board with paper in her hand. She looked rushed and stressed. She left her line while it was running, walked twenty yards, and transferred information from the paper to the board. She acknowledged us and then rushed back to her line.

As we walked around the rest of the factory, I noticed there were no production boards at any of the lines. Everyone had to walk away from what they were doing and go to the main production board to enter information on an hourly basis. Sometimes, they were so busy they didn’t update information. The leadership team lamented that fact and wondered what could be done about it.

I shared these suggestions with the team:

·        Place the information in a convenient spot to the person who maintains and uses it.

·        Train the leadership team to go to the information, rather than making it come to them.

·        Engage with the person doing the work in their own space and in their own time.

The team was intrigued and thought it might be helpful to incorporate these ideas and other principles of Visible Evidence into a Kaizen event designed to improve quality and scrap performance. A month later we kicked off the Kaizen.