Go to Gemba: good leadership starts on the work floor

Go to Gemba is an excellent addition for anyone involved with continuous improvement. For instance, the method fits perfectly with your Daily Management System and the Kaizen method. Find out how Go to Gemba adds to a successful improvement project! 

What is Go to Gemba?

Go to Gemba is a successful operational management method based on the idea that actual improving starts at the work floor. 

What does the term Go to Gemba mean?

Gemba is a Japanese word meaning “the real place”. It’s the real place, or the work floor, the place of production, the place where it really happens, the place where value is created. The place where value is added or taken away.

This instantly shows why Gemba is so important in the company process. This is the place to be when you want to know your company process or streamline or improve it. You must see what happens on the work floor to discover what can be bettered. This makes Gemba the place for employees and management alike.

How does Go to Gemba work in practice?

With Gemba Walks, you and the steering group visit the work floor regularly because that is the place where value is genuinely added – or taken away.

A Gemba Walk can be a daily or weekly walk – depending on the organization’s need or the need for improvement. During these work floor rounds, the employees take a few minutes to share what goes on: what manufacturing loss has occurred in the previous round, what are issues with improving efficiency, and is it possible to adhere to the standards?

Management sees, hears, and understands how the process really flows. These observations make it easier for management to initiate improvement actions and prioritize.

What are the advantages?

1. Collaboration starts to occur between the different organizational layers. By walking among the machines or through the manufacturing hall and engaging in conversation, employees are confident that managers understand what’s happening on the work floor.
2. On the work floor, it’s often immediately clear when a line or manufacturing isn’t running well. Data doesn’t always show that or can be difficult to interpret correctly.
3. Employees escalate their issues more easily and earlier to (middle) management, so improvement actions are taken earlier.

Go to Gemba as part of your Daily Management System

A Daily Management System, or DMS, ensures that operational targets are met and secured daily. DMS is not performed in an office but on and with the work floor. Everyone contributes, from their position, to the central policy goals. 

The meeting is based on tested knowledge, which means establishing your findings and testing them against reality. You make a plan, make sure everybody knows the plan, and then test what you have really achieved with your plan. Go to Gemba is valuable in supporting this process.

Go to Gemba and Kaizen

Go to Gemba and DMS are also valuable additions to the Kaizen method. Kaizen is a way of thinking about a changing improvement culture. Kaizen is a structured search for fitting improvements instead of on-the-fly solutions. You cannot change the company’s performance in one day. It’s an incremental process with small steps.

To improve, you need to know about waste. A large part of it occurs on the work floor. Go to Gemba helps to profoundly chart waste and the use basic Kaizen principles to address waste:

• Identify the issue
• Address the issue where it occurs
• Prevent the recurrence of the issue
• Grow towards the next step in the improvement project

The Plan-Do-Check-Act of the Deming circle is the basis of this improvement project.

From Gemba Walk to secured improvement action

Cierpa Software is about improving profoundly and collectively. The Cierpa Kaizen software module is ideally suited to support Go to Gemba, with a clear PDCA action list that makes the improvement points in your organization visible and manageable for everyone.

Cierpa Kaizen enables you to:

• Easily collect input for actions from all levels, using OEE and the mobile app; this way, improvement ideas won’t get lost
• Turn improvement ideas into an improvement action (easy to solve), improvement team (complex issues), or improvement proposal (does it require an investment?)
• Organize escalation and feedback transparently, so you always have a guideline during meetings. You can use the application, or print out action lists to share information with levels that don’t have access to the tool
• Use Kaizen filters for standard forms per level, use labels to configure a list, or make a list search easier
• Configure digital whiteboards for consulting and problem analysis