Visual management – Getting ahead with symbols

Using symbols in your presentation, whether it’s on screen or on paper is very effective and could give clear picture to your audiences. Symbols usage had rooted thousands of years before the invention of the modern day’s alpha-numeric writing which I’m using now. Nevertheless, the use of symbols nowadays are still widespread and among the symbols that are popularly used today are the cross (×) and the tick (∕) which carry the universal the meaning of wrong and correct or right respectively. The cross and tick are symbols have been the most useful means of communication between teachers, students and parents for many decades. All ticks in the homework books would make parents proud of the children as they know that their children are good in their studies.
During my early school days I would feel uneasy if my homework books are filled with crosses marked by my teachers, the more crosses I received the more uneasy I’d become. I got on few occasions the teacher would just made a big cross that covered the whole page of my exercise book. I felt like tearing off the page which I couldn’t because the teacher would report my bad behavior to the headmaster.
In daily business communication, the use of symbols have many advantages over descriptive words. Two profound advantages in symbols are first symbols do not occupy large spaces particularly if the presentation is on a spreadsheet and secondly it’s a real time saver as there are no descriptions to be written. There are four symbols that are being used in Total Quality Management in entire Japan, they are the cross, the triangle, the circle and the double circle (one smaller circle inside the circle). These four symbols have powered Japan Industries as leaders in the production of quality products and services.
There are two types of measurements that must be carried out when conducting analyses in today’s businesses; they are either quantitative or qualitative measurements. The quantitative measurement is one that quantifies amount of the items being measured, example are, 5.89kg of potatoes in a bag or $4.12 per piece of screw. While qualitative measurement is commonly made in comparison with a standard or a reference items. It is relative. One example is a par in your golf score can be marked with a circle symbol in your score card or in another example a lighter object against the standard object can be indicated by a triangle in your record sheet. Symbols can be used in most of the qualitative measurements and analyses and in some situations they are most suitable.
The four symbols described above are; first, a cross symbols which means any situation that is totally out of expectation or an action plan that has not started. The second symbol which is a triangle represents any situation that has just taken off or test results that below the expectation and not good enough. When confronted with a triangleor even a cross, more effort must be taken as corrective actions to get the expected results. The third symbols, a circle means situations or conditions that meet the set expectations, such as a par score on a certain hole of a golf round; it can also mean that situations that are under control or a project that is ending with expected results. Lastly the fourth, the double circle or a closed loop is to indicate any situation or condition that is closed or completed. This symbol is also used to indicate above expectation results, like an A+ grade of a test for example.
Projects matrixes, charts and tables can be simplified by utilizing these symbols, they are simple to prepare, easily to understand and a real time saver.

Visual management – simply the best communication option

I’m very sure that most of us knew pretty well what is meant by the saying “A picture can tell a thousand words”. This old cliché is very much useful in simplifying the communication process intra and inter organizations. A smiley in an instant messenger is a perfect example of a visual that has replaced lots of descriptive words and a tremendous time saver. It’s so simple, direct, understandable, and fast to get your message across; I sure that you’d agree with me.
Some countries have come up a very simple and easy to identify rest rooms whether they are for male or female with only visual signs; but unfortunately in my country this simple convention has not been used for reasons which I really don’t know. In Japan for example, a ladies rest rooms are marked by any simple drawing shape (triangle or a circle) that is pink in color while for gentlemen the shape is colored blue. So, being a simple minded person, I’d always look for blue color when looking for public gents rest rooms. In Malaysia most of the toilets signs are unicolored and a simple sketch (long haired face and a side face figure with a tobacco pipe in the mouth) to differential between ladies and gentlemen respectively. Wouldn’t it be easy if the same color convention by were to be used?
Signboards, posters and banners are the existing visual management media that are still being trusted by organizations as the effective means to communicate to employees, contractors and customers. With the advent multimedia for PCs and mobile devices, the possibilities to communicate with visual management is limitless. Myspace.com and Youtube.com are excellent examples of how visual management can be very effective in helping managers and entrepreneurs to getting their business goals faster. Business performance graphs reprsented online can be programmed to impart tremendous amount of information to affiliates and branches offices around the world. Google Analytics has done a really good job in making graphic presentations which has vast application potential. Visual management is simply the best communication option that is readily available.

What’s hidden under the slogan ‘Anzen Ichi Ban’ (Safety First) part 10 – Safety management.

Many companies and businesses nowadays regard safety management more important than other management systems due to the fact that it could stimulate cost saving, produce higher quality products and services, provide ideal working environment and an organizational culture that is positive towards attaining higher goals. The topic like 5S which was traditionally regarded as the steps for the betterment of housekeeping has made its way into more important revenue generating activities integrating itself with kaizen or continuous improvement, total productive maintenance and time management systems. In fact safety management, if we were to look at it in a broad perspective is the driving power of all systems that are essential for a good business of today.
A successful safety management today does not only focus on accident prevention and accidents investigations, it encompasses all activities that make business running and earning profit. As mentioned earlier, this is accomplished through its integration with all the functions of the organization. The benefits that a company may enjoy can be listed as following:

1. In human resources department: High employees’ morale is always associated with organizations that are accident free and always show evidence of lower rate of employment turn over. People are more attracted working in accident free organization – it goes without saying.

2. In finance department: Accident free environment of a business would resul in lower premiums of various types of insurances. Medical expenditure would also be at minimum.

3. In manufacturing department: High efficiency of work performance and lower resignation rate are the forces behind better quality products and services, hence meeting the requirements of customers. Meeting delivery datelines of customers is also one of its merits.

4. In design department: As all the employees are driven by the ‘Safety First’ slogan, design personnel will take serious considerations on the safety aspects when designing new products or an improved new versions of the existing products. This will increase the confidence of the customers towards using the products or services provided by the company.

5. In purchasing or procurement department: Getting reliable services from suppliers and sub-contractors can be a nightmare if they were unreliable, problematic and without the knowledge of 5S. Sub-contractors who are outstanding in the safety records would normally share the same values with the principle companies and often they have no problem work in accordance to the set of rules that were imposed upon the by the principle companies when signing the service agreements.

6. In the CEO’s department: As the leader of the organization or the company, he has to lead his organization by giving undivided attention and facilitate in all safety activities. He has to demonstrate leadership by example and to uphold the 3 objectives of safety management; firstly zero loss of life, secondly zero injuries and thirdly zero damage to properties.

What’s hidden under the slogan ‘Anzen Ichi Ban’ (Safety First) part 9 – Positive attitude.

In today’s post I’ll introduce you the final process of making your work place a safe and efficient place to conduct your business. The route towards realizing zero accident and maximizing your profit started with firstly cleaning/clearing up, secondly orderly arrangement, thirdly making them shine and fourthly operational standards. The fifth and final process which is in the same category as the forth process, that is maintaining and upkeeping the new improved conditions is mainly concerned about getting the right habits to sustain the improved conditions that were set up by the earlier processes. It’s instilling the right culture to the team or organization so that everybody in the team will contribute equally to sustain the continuous improvement activities for as many generations to come. Many Japanese corporations have proven that this approach is undeniably correct.
The five processes can be broken down into two stages. The first being the action stage where physical effort is required to clear up, arrange to order and keeping everything spic-and span; the second stage which concentrates on managing and maintaining the results and conditions from the first stage and sustaining a constant ‘growth rate’ of continuous improvement.
The content of this fifth process was already written in my previous 5-part blog posts entitled ‘Positive thinking’. Please read them if you’ve not read them. A positive mindset is simple to acquire if you decide to take immediate actions on things that can be accomplished within 2 to 3 minutes first, listing them as priority in your daily do list. If you make it a point to act 10 minutes at the beginning of your day, 10 minutes when you resume after lunch and 10 minutes at the end of your day, you got 30 minute to focus on items that need immediate actions. Within this period you could easily complete 10 to 15 simple but necessary items for the day leaving you with ample time to concentrate on meetings, discussions and jobs that require interaction with others. These actions will leave your ‘in’ bin empty every day before retiring for the day.
The 5 processes which I mentioned is popularly know as 5S activities, namely;
1. Seiri (Cleaning / clearing up)
2. Seiton (Arrange to order)
3. Seiso (Shining or Spic-and-span)
4. Seiketsu (Operational standard of the system in placed)
5. Shitsuke (Positive attitude of team members)
As I indicated earlier, items 1 to 3 are actions that require physical efforts and some form of creativity, item 4 is making the working conditions suitable, comfortable and safe, and the final item 5 is ‘fine tuning’ our attitude and mindset towards achieving the vision of the group or the organization that we belong to.
For further read up on the processes that I wrote please do a Google search on ‘5s activities, lean manufacturing, kaizen’. Happy reading.

What’s hidden under the slogan ‘Anzen Ichi Ban’ (Safety First) part 8 – Operational standards.

We’ve gone through the three vital initial processes towards achieving zero accident in our work places or workshops. The three processes are cleaning/clearing up, orderly arrangement of items and making them shine. These processes are pretty straight forward and can be effectively carried out; however, to maximize their benefit they have to be carried out in the sequence which begins by cleaning and clearing up of everything in sight, followed by arranging the items that are essential and important to conducting your daily business in the order most comfortable to you and your team members and thirdly keeping them shining and tidy (free from dust) all the time. The combination of these three processes will guarantee that your work place is a safe place at least for the period when it is cleaned. To make it safe for as long as possible requires constant maintenance and continuous improvement of the situation. Making your work place or workshop free from hazardous is important not only to avoid accident and injuries but most important to be lean and in the long run maximizing your profit.
In this post I’ll describe the task which in my opinion is most difficult to be carried out in order to ensure that our work places are safe and inspiring for as long as we desired. The question to be answered is; how can we maintain so that our work places or workshops or offices are well always organized, highly efficient, and spic-and-span? For most of us, the answer would be employing more office assistants or general cleaners and assign them the cleaning jobs. Well, if such shortcuts were taken, the following results could result, clean - may be; efficient - may be not. The problem with us is we never learn to clean up the mess that was made by ourselves in the first place. That’s why most of us would resort to employing cleaners, and there will always be somebody who does the picking job for us. Employing more staff for these menial jobs is definitely not the answer as it would invite more problems into your work place and your operating cost would escalate. On the other hand, if you were organized and efficient more and more cost could be reduced through continuous improvement on the first three processes and standardization of your operational procedures and that will takes us to the forth process of achieving zero accident in your work places.
The forth process to achieving accident free environment with additional benefits of low cost, high quality and high efficient is to conduct our business in accordance to a set of rules that were adopted as the operational standards of the system in which we are in. These rules could be as simple as doing what ever comes first into your ‘in’ bin (first in; first out basis) as described in the previous post. Every thing must go through this process, even though some may be just trash. Until we take a look at them, we don’t know whether they are trash in the first place, so never be judgmental until we are absolute sure that they really are. And don’t work on the easy ones and leaving behind the difficult ones lying idle in the ‘in’ bin, you might be facing the whole bunch of difficult one later. This way, you are assured that all items are being screened through before distributing them into classification like immediate actions or to put in incubations or keep as references or to trash them. You can make use of some good guidelines from time management literatures and employ them as your operational standards.
The key to continuous improvement is to make your standards open and make room for new set of rules. Standards should not be rigid and unchangeable as they would hinder the continuous improvement activities of your organization. Many of us take standards as the entities that are not negotiable which regard improvements as unnecessary and a waste of time. Continuous improvements allow us to strive beyond the limits and setting up improved standards that surpass the capability of our competitors. Only by diligently following the present standards one can discover new areas to study and hence making viable improvements.
What makes standardization so important is actually getting measured results. Accurate and reliable results are the products of good documentation, measurements, standard procedures and data comparison knitted together to make an operational standard. These results could be used to steer the team in the direction towards achieving your desired goals. An on coming vision of the entire organization would then be formulated more realistically with all the teams get together pursuing towards one common target. Over time, every one would be playing their individual role in executing the processes, getting favorable results effortlessly and in most efficient manner; thus making cooperation and team work as the forces behind the organization that could survive harsh and uncertain economic conditions.

What’s hidden under the slogan ‘Anzen Ichi Ban’ (Safety First) part 7 – Keep shining them

Let’s review what I’ve written in the last two posts. We started with cleaning and clearing up all the mess and discarding away all unwanted materials and junks that were left unnoticed for sometimes. This action would clear up some places which can be utilized later for value added purposes. Having done the cleaning and clearing, the next on going activity is to arrange the essential items that left behind in a manner that would clear up our daily activities towards attaining high efficiency. Tagging and classifying these items is a good practice that must be carried out and maintained in order to strive for continuous improvements.
In almost all human activities, getting things done for short period of time is easy but over time our attentions could swerve in other directions and things would gradually return to situation that started off in the beginning. Once this happened, it’s just impossible to recover the time and money that was wasted away. We can't afford to treat these activities like periodic or seasonal carnivals where the activities are only expected to last about a week or one month where the level of enthusiasm was high. The fact that we are so accustomed to this type of life makes us slack in up keeping or maintaining a constant level of concentration over time. Without any doubt, maintaining the orderly arrangement of materials in our workplace for as long as we want it to be is indeed difficult; that’s why in the Japanese kaizen (continuous improvement) of 5S the third step of shining up is simple and vital and acts as a stepping stone towards the more difficult part which is maintaining and making it a part of our daily lives. I will write about it in the oncoming post.
Shining up your working place is a very simple and straight forward act, and yet it being left undone may be because it is too simple or its trivialness is a good excuse for postponement. If you are a person who is very particular about neatness and tidiness, it’ll be good for you to keep up this habit and not be influenced by others who despise it. You can lead the way for your team members to emulate good working practices. Once your habits becomes imbedded and followed by your co-workers you can be proud that you’ve changed the lives of your friends to be more positive towards their work places. The results will be reflected in reducing amount of money incurred by these work places and the income amount will steadily increase.
About 10 years ago, in Japan while going on tour to the historic city of Kyoto, I observed that the drivers of ‘kanko’ (tourists) buses dusted the body of their busses with long feather dusters, some as tall as the drivers themselves, while waiting for their passengers to return to the buses. Practically all the drivers, regardless from what company they belong to, did that routine while waiting for the group of tourists to return from their tour rounds. This acts of dusting entire body of the buses really impressed me. I’m sure that the acts of dusting the buses are still going on until to day. This simple act of keeping their buses shining is important for three reasons. First, is to keep on working and be productive while waiting for their passengers to return in about 30 minutes. Second, the comparatively higher level of quality consciousness of the general public in Japan demands the drivers to maintain a higher standard of services which include the best appearance of the buses all the time. Third, the drivers being responsible employees from their respective ‘kanko’ bus companies must up held the name of their companies, thus leaving the logo or the name of their companies hidden under the accumulated dust would reflect the lazy or poor attitude of the employees. Hence, by keeping the logo or name of their companies under the dust would be committing some sort of sin by the drivers.
By keeping our eyes on to all the places in our workshop always, will keep away all unwanted items from entering our system. Keep a bin or a basket (an ‘in’ bin) at the entrance of the work shop is an excellent idea of only allowing the things that are worthy to course of the business into the work places. On the opposite end of the ‘in’ bin, you can place another bin that carries an ‘out’ label. Every time after going through the contents of the ‘in’, items that has no value to the improvement of the business like junk mails, ads from local stores, unread portion of newspapers and wrappers can go straight into the ‘out’ bin. This act is a definite time saver, rather than allowing all this junks into the workshop and let them accumulate before actually discard them away later. The golden rule is to only allow the items that require completing of the work cycle in the workshop and to profiting from the completion of the work cycle.
Keeping spic-and-span of every little item in your place that were designed to earning money would result in more money coming at you. Your daily routine is very simple, just follow closely to the routine that I wrote in the ‘Clean up’ post will surely takes you to a prosperous future – Do your clean up routine 10 minutes before work start, 10 minutes after lunch and 10 minutes after you completed the day’s job. No matter where you are or in what business you are in, doing it day in and day out as the best practice because it is THE right thing to keep your business going.

What’s hidden under the slogan ‘Anzen Ichi Ban’ (Safety First) part 6 – Orderliness

It’s a very good sign that you have already started clearing up your places of work or your workshops. When I did this cleaning and clearing before; I recovered some old bills, important letters, my insurance premium receipts, the screw driver that I thought was taken by somebody else and even some money. That answered why I was behind at getting the right things done on time. No wonder much of my time was wasted looking for these things and it was so bad that I just forgot about the whole thing. I am very careful now not to take any junks or rubbish from outside into my working place. There are just too many junks out there like brochures for machine parts, directories, and catalogs that I brought back from exhibitions or hundred of old diskettes that contain some information that I really don’t need anymore.
Filtering off the items from getting into your workshops is a must to maintain the amount of accumulated stuffs that if left unchecked would develop into time wasted problems later. Make sure that these items are discarded immediately because you don’t actually need them although sometimes your conscience would feel otherwise. If you want to have a collection of items, let the items be something which can appreciate in value over time. Don’t buy some tools just because you need to use them once. We can afford to accumulated useless items and spent money or time to manage their inventories. It’s ridiculous.
Ok, in my last post I attached a photo of a workshop of a violin maker. She got this perfectly arranged cute little workshop that worth giving 10 out of 10 points. For the benefit of you guys, I attached the photo with a slightly higher resolution. Every thing big or small is neatly arranged; materials and tools are in order. It’s a perfect place to wooing money to come. You see orderliness is your next task after first cleaning and clearing away the junks from your workplace. All things come in shapes, type and sizes that enables you to place them in an orderly manner.
Use your creativity to get all the tools, materials, books, etc properly arranged; put in some artistic touch to arranging them in the manner that you are comfortable with. Use your imagination to get this thing done in a satisfying way. As I wrote earlier, small items that are frequently used can be on your table or places that can be assess effortlessly. You might want to use different colors to differentiate different sizes or material types. Yeah, get into the visible management.
Another hidden benefit of good arrangement is space optimization and you can use the space or area that you have ‘reclaimed’ for more valuable activities. Don’t utilize it for storing items that are supposed to be discarded. May be a place for your meditation or worship…is up to you as long as it is being used for purposes that add values to your work. Orderliness and smart arrangement or our workshops or working places can have a positive impact on your motivation to be more productive. Make our work places as the places for the minds to be inspired to do more and to get more without burning extra energy. As I told you earlier money has no eyes, but it has class when choosing a place for to reside.