Lean boards across different locations

world map with digilean logo spread around hotspots

Do your company have locations in different places?
Is it difficult to coordinate and standardize best practice across your facilities?

Using digital lean tools and digital lean boards as a method to standardize and communicate best practice will help you manage a multi-location business with better results. Share your learning and optimized processes across teams, facilities and locations to utilize the potential in lean thinking.

Communication

Proper communication is often difficult to master. We can talk, but we often fail to communicate. Communication is all about getting the receiver to understand your message. How you succeed is often NOT saying what you think, but to communicate it in a way the receiver can interpret. 

Different professions and positions, different backgrounds, different locations are all factors in communication quality. When you are responsible for operations across locations, that being factories, labs, teams or offices, it can be hard to achieve effective learning horizontally. 

Even though LEAN is a principle build on a learning culture, the results are often optimized within departments or locations. One way to mitigate this and achieve better results overall is to coordinate the learnings, gather best practices and standardize as much as possible across your organization.

Traditional lean boards

Most lean organizations still use traditional boards with markers, magnets, post-its and charts printed on paper. First of all, a lot of time and effort is spent daily on extracting the necessary data for your KPIs. Charts must be updated in Excel, printed and placed on the board manually and it requires regular attendance to maintain your boards.

The board itself works fine, but they don’t facilitate any follow up or learning across teams.

Horizontal communication

One whiteboard, one layout, one practice. 

A successful team can easily create strong ownership to their success. This includes all their decisions, processes, tools and methods. This will contradict the lean principles (yokoten) as a true lean culture is a learning culture. Being open to learning is being open to change for the better (kaizen). 

Divided team clipart

Vertical communication

Another factor is the vertical communication – being able to aggregate, escalate issues and implement higer level decisions with employee engagement is a critical success factor. It is also imperative to achieve the lateral learning of yokoten.  Many companies have a hard time communicating issues from the teams to the middle or upper management. This leaves the management blindfolded in their decision processes and daily management. Issues, improvements and plans are not communicated well back to the management.

Digital LEAN boards

With digital LEAN boards built on the same online platform, information becomes a lot more accessible. DigiLEAN allows you and the teams to design your boards and interact with them daily. Updates on task status, due dates and responsible are being updated across the platform in realtime. The same thing goes for the dashboards and visual KPIs. There is no need to extract data manually, generate graphs in Excel, print numerous examples to put up on each individual board. 

Each report, each graph, each KPI is constantly available and up-to-date using DigiLEAN. 

This saves a lot of time and effort, and you can spend more time focusing on the subjects that create more value.
Of course, we can integrate with other IT system to include other KPIs in the DigiLEAN dashboards.

As all employees and managers can use the same platform and individual boards, it’s easy to re-assign or escalate issues and tasks, perform root cause analyses and share the learning across the whole company. One point lectures, standards or A3 can be added to the dashboard, be part of your daily meeting agenda or displayed on a common information screen for everyone to see.

Animation showing how to easily reassign task responsibility
animated gif showing how to create a root cause analysis A3 in DigiLEAN
Save DigiLEAN board as new template

Since DigiLEAN is an online platform, you can also re-use the boards, or standardize your board layouts across your teams and locations. This way you can bring the best practice to the other teams and locations easily, and continuously improve the organization as a whole.

Read more about the DigiLEAN platform

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