Introduction To Visual Management
This topic teaches you how to build a first visual management system on a line or at a workstation: choose few indicators, display them where the team passes by, and make sure they trigger an action rather than decorating a wall.
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A team leader who has to ask three people where the morning's production stands is wasting time, and so is the team. Visual management solves this problem by making the state of the line readable in a few seconds, by anyone, without opening a file or asking a question.
This course is aimed at team leaders, shop floor managers, methods technicians and continuous improvement facilitators who do not yet have a team board, or who have one that nobody looks at anymore. By the end, you will know how to distinguish useful visual information from a decorative display, choose three to five indicators for a given level, design and position a team board, then check two weeks later whether it is really being used. The topic stays at the introductory level: it prepares for the 5S and daily performance meeting courses, both of which rely on these foundations.
What you will be able to do
- Distinguish information that can be read in three seconds and triggers an action from a display that informs without changing anything.
- Identify, among the three areas of use (workstation, team management, project), the one that addresses the problem on your own line.
- Set up a working group and select three to five indicators for a given level, with an owner and an update frequency for each.
- Design the mock-up of a team board with a colour code of no more than three colours and choose its location based on foot traffic flows.
- Audit an existing system with five questions and recognise the three most common causes of failure: outdated data, overload, absence of decision.
The path
- What visual management does, and what it does not do 4 min
- Three areas where it makes a difference: the workstation, the team, the project 4 min
- Form the group and choose three to five indicators 4 min
- Draw the board and place it where the team walks past 4 min
- Two weeks later: checking that the board is being used 4 min
Prerequisites
No methodological prerequisites. You need to know how a line or a workshop operates day to day and know which figures the team already records (hourly output, stoppages, scrap). Having taken the 5S course helps but is not necessary.
The closing quiz
The topic ends with a 7-question quiz, and a certificate is issued on success.