Visual Management: Seeing Performance Every Day

Many businesses find out how they performed when the month-end figures arrive. By then the late deliveries have been shipped, the scrap has been binned and the overtime has been paid. Visual management is about seeing performance while there is still time to act on it. A board on the shop floor or a simple dashboard on a screen shows a team and its leaders where they stand today. The board matters less than the short, regular conversation that happens in front of it.

Choose a few measures

The most common mistake is putting too much on the board. A wall covered in charts looks impressive during a customer visit and gets ignored the rest of the time. A team needs a small number of measures it can influence directly, shown in a way that can be read from a few steps away.

A well-used structure groups measures under five headings:

• Safety: accidents, near misses and open safety actions.
• Quality: internal rejects, customer returns, first-off failures.
• Delivery: orders shipped on time and in full against plan. Our article on on-time in-full delivery explains how to measure it honestly.
• Cost: scrap, overtime or output against standard hours.
• People: attendance, training completed, skills coverage.

Not every team needs a measure under every heading, and the measures should differ by area. The press shop, the toolroom and the despatch area each have their own drivers. The test for each measure is simple: can this team change it, and will they know by tomorrow whether they have?

Each measure should show a target and the actual, with a plain signal of whether today or this week was on target. Red and green work well, provided red is treated as a prompt to talk rather than a reason to blame.

The review is what makes the board useful

A board that nobody stands in front of is wallpaper. The value comes from a short, regular review at a fixed time.

At team level this is usually a daily stand-up at the start of the shift, ten or fifteen minutes at most. The team leader goes through each measure, notes what was missed yesterday and why, and agrees who will deal with any issue. Problems that cannot be solved in the area are passed up.

Above that, supervisors and managers meet at a set time each day or week to look at the issues the teams have raised and to remove obstacles the teams cannot remove themselves. Senior leaders should walk the boards regularly, ask questions and follow up on what they are told. When teams see that raising a problem leads to action, the boards start to fill with useful information. When nothing happens, they stop bothering.

A few habits help:

• Same time, same place, every day. The review should not depend on whether the manager is in.
• Standing, short and focused. Detailed problem solving happens afterwards, with the right people.
• Actions have names and dates. An action list with no owners is a wish list.
• Repeated misses become problems to solve. A measure that is red week after week needs root cause work, not another explanation.

Moving from paper to digital

Many businesses start with whiteboards and paper charts, and there is a lot to be said for that. They are cheap, quick to change and everyone can see the team leader filling them in. The limit comes when the same figures are being collected by hand in several places, or when managers want to see trends across areas without walking the whole site.

Simple digital dashboards can help here. Data already held in your ERP, scheduling or quality system can be shown on a screen in the area and on a manager's laptop without anyone retyping it. Spreadsheets are a reasonable halfway step, provided someone owns them and they are not copied into five slightly different versions.

The risk in going digital is losing the habit. A dashboard that people look at alone at their desks replaces the daily conversation with a report, and the board stops doing its job. To avoid that:

• Keep the stand-up. Hold it in front of the screen, at the same time, with the same structure.
• Keep the measures few. Software makes it easy to add charts. Resist it.
• Keep it trustworthy. If the figures on screen do not match what the team knows happened, they will stop believing them. Our article on turning data into information covers how to get the underlying data right.
• Move one area first. Prove it works in one place before rolling it out.

Linking it to the plan

Visual management works best when the measures on the shop floor connect to the business's objectives. If the board has decided that delivery performance is this year's priority, delivery should appear on every relevant board, with each team seeing its own part of it. That is how a plan set at board level becomes something people deal with every day.

Visual performance management is part of our governance and organisational design work, from choosing the measures to setting up the review rhythm and moving to digital tools. If you would like help, get in touch.