Improving Daily Management

I’ve been involved with various continuous-improvement processes, such as 5S, kaizen events and gemba walks, and recently participated in a rapid-improvement event. This is really a mini-kaizen event, and the target was the company’s daily operations management.

The purpose of daily management is to identify abnormalities, standardize daily activities, provide a cross-functional interface, develop process consistency and track key performance indicators. Daily management is the foundation of continuous improvement and provides more visibility to critical business needs. How is our safety? Did we have any incidents or close calls? Are any machines down? What is our quality rate? Do we have any past-due parts that will cause delivery issues? What did we ship the previous day? Are we on track for our monthly sales and production goals? If not, what is preventing us from achieving our goals?

The objective is to answer all these questions, and more, with visual metrics posted in our meeting room and on the shop floor.

We started our rapid-improvement event with an event charter, a document that contains:

• the department or process directly impacted by the event;
• the problem to solve;
• the objective of the event;
• the key deliverables;
• the event schedule and milestones;
• the participating team members;
• other considerations, such as budget constraints and roadblocks.

This was an extremely focused event, involving 11 team members and lasting 3 hours. The goal was to improve our operations-management meetings, gemba walks and coordinator meetings. We wanted better visuals to see whether or not we are achieving our daily goals.