The GEMBA walk

Before we went and had the Intro to 5S and I spoke about the five individual wastes of time that need to be recognised by anyone wishing to tackle 5S themselves, hire my services or even just asking for some brotherly advice, to conduct a GEMBA walk around their production facilities. It is time well spent and will assist you in understanding the waste in totality. These are the instructions for the GEMBA walk. Let’s add some formality to the process.

By performing a self assessing GEMBA walk and writing down their observations, owners and senior management will maybe be asking themselves “what did I just witness, why do I see what I see and what do I do to repair it”.

But firstly what is this GEMBA thing?

GEMBA (現場) is another Japanese term used in many LEAN methodology’s and it means “actual place”.

  • If you are watching a visual media news program and have a reporter sitting at a desk you may pay attention but if the reporter is in the “actual place” where the news took place, you would normally pay greater attention.

  • You will witness a better atmosphere attending any sporting event live rather than watching it on television? Expectations are met and greater knowledge is gained when you are in the “actual place”. 

  • Problems on the factory floor cannot be fixed in the boardroom or the corner office.

Production problems can only be remedied when you are on the factory floor, in the “actual place” where those problems are occurring.

Even when you think you have no problems, you will only be sure when you have visited and are in the “actual place”.

As an individual, the “actual place” is both in your physical workplace but more importantly, when wanting to eliminate personal waste, it is in your mind.

Only you can conduct this mind assessment but for the physical Gemba assessment, you must genchi gembutsu (go and see).

Pair your GEMBA with genchi gembutsu (go and see).

Implementing a 5 day, 12 minute assessment plan by conducting a GEMBA walk.

• Select a week when you will be in attendance at the work place from Monday to Friday.

• Arrange your time so that you arrive at work at the same time each day. (Don’t blame traffic if you can’t). If you are going to blame traffic, wait until we progress further when we look at Root Cause Analysis.

• Organise your time so that 30 minutes after you arrive at work, you can spend 12 minutes and only 12 minutes in the work area you want to assess.

• All you need are your eyes, a notepad and a pencil.

• Find a place in the work area where you are most likely not to be disturbed.

• Apart from common courtesies such as hello, good morning etc., do not engage in any conversation during this 12 minute period.

• Day 1 – Look around the work place and note if any workers seem to be wandering aimlessly or walking unnecessarily long distances to, a) collect equipment, b) return equipment or c) to get a drink, etc...

• Day 2 - Look around the work place and note if any workers are taking an unnecessarily long time searching for equipment. Are tools kept in closed/locked cupboards?

• Day 3 – Look around the work place and note if there are any operations or storage areas that would best be suited elsewhere.

• Day 4 - Look around the work place and note if there is an excess of inventory. This includes finished product, semi-finished product, raw materials and packing materials (and people).

• Day 5 - Look around the work place and note if the workers are engaged in excessive bending, twisting or turning when performing their duties.

Carry out these observations and do not take more than the allocated 12 minutes per day.

· Each day, when you return to your work space, sort out your notes, put them in order. Estimate how many minutes and/or how much space was being taken up by non-productive time and/or storage.

· If 3 minutes were wasted, which is 25% of your observation time, you have problems. You would hate to think that 25% of an 8 hour working day was being lost due to non-productive time! Can space be better used by more productive tasks?

· It is not necessary to either note the areas where the above was taking place or note the names of employees you observe. You can rest assured that if it is happening in one area it is happening in other areas, if one worker appears to be wasting time, they will not be alone. And it may not be the worker at fault.

· If you found one area of concern over the week you can most probably solve this internally.

· If there are 2 or more areas of concern you should be looking to ask for an outside assessment of the work place.

In all the above areas that you have observed, is there is “waste” that can be eliminated?

Note: I will say that the majority of businesses and people that can derive great benefits from a 5S implementation are successful companies and people.

These companies have grown quickly and during the growth spurt of the business were keeping up with the extra questions being thrown at them and had demands from customers.

Decisions were made on the fly.

Where should that new piece of equipment should be placed? Where can we store the sprockets for this next “one and only order” the sprockets that we are still using in production 7 years later.

As the number of employees grows, places need to found for water fountains, lockers and of course, extra tools and equipment for them to use in production.

If the business maintains momentum and orders and profits continue to grow, the need to reassess where that piece of equipment was situated or can we find a better space to store the sprockets takes a back seat to the day to day management of the business which is getting them orders.

The same applies to the people as they become more “busy”.

Conclusion

Many times, waste is difficult to recognise.

Recognising waste is our initial step to eliminating that waste. With minimal distractions, go and see  the actual place where you know the waste is occurring.

We are attempting to make Keynes prediction come to fruition, we need to eliminate waste and busyness.

“Continuous Improvement is not about the things you do well – that’s work. Continuous Improvement is about removing the things that get in the way of your work. The headaches, the things that slow you down, that’s what Continuous Improvement is all about” – Bruce Hamilton