What is Digital Visual Management?
To better control the production process, industry players are now turning to digital visual management. This approach ensures compliance with standards and enables everyone to intervene in case of malfunctions, regardless of their hierarchical position.
Why digitize visual management?
Lost information, wasted time, low motivation, and unsold or lost goods are harmful to a factory’s profitability. To break this unproductive cycle, the industry has adopted visual management, often inspired by Mind Mapping. This “mental map” organizes all questions, reflections, and suggestions related to a given topic into a flowchart-like visual, similar to a Gantt chart. This representation helps outline your needs using keywords and themes. It enables you to “draw” the structure of your production chain, from potential suppliers to material inventories, while maintaining a global view of financing.
Digital visual management is particularly useful for updating internal information, making it an extremely efficient tool for industrial applications. Through this type of management, we move toward Industry 4.0.
This new type of communication replaces traditional visual management. Data is now digitized and accessible from any connected screen, whether in the field or offices, at every stage of the production process, in real-time. When an issue arises, it is visible to all on a summary board showing all indicators. The immediacy of this information allows for quicker action plans to solve problems, which can then be implemented at all levels until resolution. Implementing digital visual management is easier if visual management practices are already in place.
How to implement digital visual management?
One of the core ideas of visual management is to give more autonomy to each working cell and each participant in the process to improve efficiency. Clear indicators will allow every station to anticipate and respond quickly and effectively. Digitizing visual management naturally impacts human resources. To ensure a smooth digital transition without destabilizing teams, we recommend starting with a test phase limited to a targeted area of the workshop to gain experience and sort productive ideas from unproductive ones.
SESA Systems supports you during the POC (Proof of Concept) phase before extending digital visual management to the entire process. The feedback gained will be invaluable before a full-scale implementation.
Guided by SESA Systems’ methodology and tools, your team will:
- Carefully inventory objectives
- Prioritize indicators to be implemented
- Configure the synthesis screen, touch-enabled or not
This will enable all your employees to work under optimal conditions, foster team spirit, and maintain a high-performance culture.
Visual management: a key Lean tool
Visual management is inherently tied to the Lean system. This management method aims to meet customer demand as closely as possible while minimizing waste. Implementing Lean manufacturing continuously improves processes, involves the workforce qualitatively, and reduces costs.
The 5S methodology is integral to Lean manufacturing and involves:
- Sorting the unnecessary from the efficient
- Organizing with ruthless efficiency (a place for everything and everything in its place)
- Maintaining cleanliness in work areas
- Keeping everything orderly once the first three points are achieved
- Making discipline a fundamental value.
Visual management: ready-to-use tools
Through rigor and clarity in disseminated information, digital visual management can reveal its full potential. To ensure success, it is crucial to update, manage, and feed the screens. Without up-to-date information, nothing can progress. Teams and stakeholders must be supported to take ownership of the tool.
The tools used in a visual management strategy should align with company values and human sensibilities to ensure harmony in tasks and team productivity. The continuous improvement approach proposed by SESA Systems incorporates all these elements.
Digital visual management opens the door to transparency in information. With its implementation, every participant can instantly know the team’s progress and contribute to achieving objectives. This ability to intervene is essential for motivation. Additionally, digital visual management eliminates many tedious reports and the associated time loss, making it an integral part of the factory of the future. For more information, feel free to contact SESA Systems’ advisory team.
