3 Reasons Why Gemba Walks Fail
As a leader in your organization, one of your primary responsibilities is to ensure that your team is functioning at its best. Problems and barriers need to be identified and eliminated. Key performance indicators (KPIs) are the first step in providing insight, but they need context. The solution for gaining a more comprehensive understanding of your operations is the daily Gemba Walk.
What exactly is a Gemba walk?
The word "Gemba" comes from Japanese and translates to "the real place", it refers to where value is created, such as a manufacturing floor or a work cell. A Gemba walk involves going to this ‘real place’ to understand the work, identify wastes, and find opportunities for continuous improvement.
The concept of the Gemba walk originated in Japan and was popularized by Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System. Ohno was a key figure in developing the principles of lean manufacturing and continuous improvement. He believed that to truly understand a process and identify opportunities for improvement, managers needed to go to the actual workplace, or Gemba, and observe the work being done firsthand.
In practice, a Gemba Walk is a planned group of stand-up meetings that happen at each work location. Teams can expect this meeting at the same time daily. It is best practice to create a visual management board for each team, which becomes the meeting place during the Gemba Walk. This meeting could be at each manufacturing line, a call center, a retail sales floor, or a project site. The visual management board shows the KPIs for that group. Each KPI has a target (or goal) as well as the current value of that metric. Visual management boards are updated daily or once per shift.
A Gemba walk is not in a conference room, cafeteria, or convention center. It is also not intended to be a virtual walk. There are, however, tools and processes for virtual teams. While we will not touch on virtual team processes in this article, we acknowledge the importance and need for daily virtual team meetings.
If a Gemba Walk is a process that everyone should practice, why does it fail for some businesses? In this article, we’ll highlight three reasons why Gemba Walks fail: Unclear Purpose, Avoiding Solving Problems, and Failure to Act.
Unclear Purpose
Before kicking off the Gemba Walk process, it is important to explain the purpose to everyone involved. Understanding the main objective of a Gemba walk is critical to ensure efficient and effective execution. The purpose of the Gemba Walk is to get information in real-time and solve problems as a team. Below are a few examples of what a Gemba Walk is and is not.
A Gemba Walk: What it is and is not
| What it is | What it is not |
|---|---|
| A short (10-15 minutes) meeting that happens once a day or once per shift. | A weekly, monthly, or yearly review. |
| A stand-up meeting where the work is done. | A conference room meeting. |
| A group collaboration involving multiple stakeholders. | A presentation to management. |
| A cross-functional meeting. | A single-function meeting |
| A meeting that is structured around KPIs on the visual management board. | A review of handouts. |
| A focused review of any KPIs that missed the goal. | A detailed report-out of all metrics. |
| Identification of actions and owners. | A discussion of missed KPIs without actionable tasks, owners, and due dates. |
| A meeting where anyone can speak up. | A top-down presentation. |
Understanding the main objective of a Gemba walk is critical to ensure efficient and effective execution.
Since the Gemba Walk is a team-based process, it’s important to engage everyone as problem-solving equals. Managers can communicate the company's priorities, direction, and challenges. The team can provide feedback about their tasks, difficulties, and suggestions. The team can receive feedback and appreciation in real-time. This two-way exchange of information improves understanding, trust, and team spirit, leading to a more cohesive and engaged workforce. A Gemba walk builds a bridge of communication between different levels of the organization.
Meeting Structure
A successful standup meeting has a structure to keep it on task and on time. The team needs to understand the goals, where they are relative to the goals, and what issues are in the way. All information should be posted on a Visual Management Board that is quick to update and easy to interpret. (Read more about Visual Management Boards here.)
Here are a few examples of KPI that businesses use:
- SQDIP: Safety, Quality, Delivery, Inventory, and Productivity
- SQDC: Safety, Quality, Delivery, Cost (or Customer)
- SQDCM: Safety, Quality, Delivery, Cost, and Morale
- SQDPG: Safety, Quality, Delivery, Productivity, and Growth
Avoiding Solving Problems
The Gemba Walk is a data-driven activity, but one pitfall is avoiding problem-solving. The Gemba Walk is part of the teams’ Standard Work. This process connects data and people in real-time; however, the impactful part of the stand-up meeting is a process known as Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA).
PDCA is a continuous quality improvement model, which is an infinite loop. PDCA is a repeated four-phase process used in businesses for the continuous improvement of processes or products. Other similar names are the Deming circle/cycle/wheel, Shewhart cycle, control circle/cycle, and Plan–Do–Study–Act (PDSA).
It is a simple process:
- Plan: Identify what is to be measured and the goal.
- Do: Put into place a change to impact that metric.
- Check: Use data to analyze the results of the change and determine the impact.
- Act: If the action was positive, create an action plan to permanently implement the action. If the action was negative, remove that action and determine a new action.
Then repeat the whole process. Here is a simple example:
| Stage | Explanation |
|---|---|
| PLAN | The daily quality goal on a manufacturing line is Daily First Past Yield (FPY) ≥ 95%. Currently, it ranges from 60% to 75% daily. |
| DO | The tolerance of the pilot hole was tightened on Machine 1. |
| CHECK | FPY for each day after was between 96%-98% |
| ACT | The adjustment to Machine 1 had a positive impact. All documentation was updated to make the change permanent. The team will continue to monitor FPY daily. |
The example above is simple but represents a lot of problem-solving completed by the team. Had they skipped the problem-solving step, they would have continued to watch the FPY metrics miss the goal each day. This is what we call “watching the news”, which is when nothing happens after the team reports a miss on the KPIs.
Failure to Act
Another pitfall we have seen teams fall victim to is failing to act. “Act” is part of the PDCA process for a reason! The quickest way to lose your team’s buy-in for the Gemba Walk process is to fail to take the actions identified in the meeting.
Since everyone is responsible for helping with the problem-solving process, the identified actions could be anyone within the group. It is best practice to only assign tasks to people who attend the stand-up meeting. This ensures that the identified action is completed by the deadline.
Conclusion
Gemba effectively means “the real place,” therefore the Gemba walk is done where your team is doing work. It could be a manufacturing floor, a call center, a retail sales floor, or a project site. The Gemba walk is a powerful daily process for managing productivity, improving communication, and shaping beneficial decision-making. Keep in mind the 3 common pitfalls to prevent your team from falling into them: Unclear Purpose, Avoiding Solving Problems, and Failure to Act.