The Visual Factory: Building Participation Through Shared Information

by Michel Greif

If you're aware of the tremendous improvements achieved in productivity and quality as a result of employee involvement, then you'll appreciate the great value of creating a visual factory. This book explains why conventional work areas, where fragmented information flows from top to bottom, must be replaced by the visual workplace, where information flows in every direction. It details how visual management can make the factory a place where workers and supervisors freely communicate so that every employee can take improvement action.The author's year-long worldwide research resulted in an abundance of practical recommendations. The communication techniques he suggests will:




Foster cohesion within groups of employees.
Turn fault-based into fact based communication.
Overcome such problems as absenteeism and high defect rates.
Stimulate an unending flow of suggestions from employees.
A valuable resource for plant, operations, and human relations managers, this text discusses how successful companies develop meeting and communication areas, communicate work standard production controls such as kanban, and make goals and progress visible. Over 200 diagrams and photos illustrate the numerous visual techniques discussed

306 pages, ebook

Published December 1, 2017

Reviews

[Bob Wallner · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm really infatuated with these "before lean" books primarily from the late Norman Bodek's Productivity Press. What I like about them is they really do a great job of taking a small topic that we take for granted today, like visual factory, and really get into the why and the how. They don't get cluttered with several other ideas or theories. They assume the reader has never experienced their topic. And they avoid hypothetical and lean more towards the actual.

Lean "experts" are supposed to know all about visuality, unfortunately today's books focus less on the tools and more on the management of lean. The edition that I have with circa 1991. NUMMI was being researched, but there still wasn't a clear understanding why Japanese manufacturers were surpassing US manufacturers.

Many of today's books revolve around how Toyota handles things. This book covers companies outside of Toyota and how they've used visuality as a competitive advantage. Although it's 100% manufacturing-based, it's not hard to imagine how the concepts could take root in a hospital or an administrative setting.

First the author suggests you need to start with visual communication (what you want communicated), include the local team members (who will manage communication), have the team create the documentation (respect for workers), implement visual production control (kanban), implement visual quality control (jidoka), establish process indicators (metrics with goals...keep it simple), and finally make progress or improvement visual (celebrate improvements).