How to implement an Obeya process

1. Reason for Action


Building an information sharing system all starts with leadership. The plant or organization leader creates the environment that empowers people to have line of sight, and get involved in creating wins, sharing information and being rewarded and recognized for success.


“The Obeya Room for Visual Project Coordination - Powerful simple tools for improving team collaboration and communication”

2. What is OBEYA?

Obeya in Japanese means simply “big room.” The OBEYA has become a major project management tool, used especially in product development, to enhance effective and timely communication. Similar in concept to traditional “war rooms,” an Obeya will contain highly visual charts and graphs depicting program timing, milestones and progress to date and countermeasures to existing timing or technical problems. The purpose is to ensure the plant leadership team has a focused snapshot of the plants performance to global metrics, plant specific Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and project timing. In addition formal reviews of the posted information should prompt questions and trigger problem solving using the A3 process as required.

3. Target State

Potential Metrics:
Safety - near miss, first aid, recordable, SAFE score
People – Q12, continuous improvement ideas implemented
Performance - $/kg, $/sqm, days on hand inventory, plant key operating indicators (KOI)
Customer - %OTD promise, customer satisfaction
Productivity – productivity, labor hours/ton

4. Gap Analysis

A Lean facility layout is one that supports a Lean culture of visualization, team-based problem solving, and building quality into the process, smooth continuous flow of material and information, and simplicity.
There are two main concepts governing metrics. The first is knowledge. Your metrics provide knowledge about your processes and help you develop better metrics. The second concept is alignment. Your metrics must align with your strategic goals for performance.
When implementing business metrics, it’s critical to link them to your overall performance. This is the key. If your metrics don’t align with your performance, then they can’t possibly tell you anything that you really need to know.

5. Solution Approach

• Develop goals that align to business objectives
• Develop dashboards that drive performance
• Measure performance to goals
• Data focused
• What went right and wrong in process?
• Internal customer feedback
• Written A3 improvement plans
• Those responsible take responsibility

6. Rapid Experiments

• Follow a formalized improvement process
Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA)
An improvement cycle based on the scientific method of proposing a change in a process, implementing the change, measuring the results, and taking appropriate action... The PDCA cycle has four stages:
1. Plan: Determine goals for a process and needed changes to achieve them.
2. Do: Implement the changes.
3. Check: Evaluate the results in terms of performance.
4. Act: Standardize and stabilize the change or begin the cycle again, depending on the results.

7. Completion Plan

1.Overview OBEYA process
2.Develop goals that align to business objectives
3.Identify key performance metrics
4.Establish OBEYA location
5.Install OBEYA boards
6.Define layered auditing process
7.Post key performance metrics
8.Initiate timely process reviews
9.Implement layered audit

OBEYA Audit

1.Leader introduced the process before starting.
2.Were open action items from the last meeting reviewed?
3.Were all required participants present?
4.Leader went over each dashboard.
5.Were action items created for metrics not being met?
6.Were any A3’s created (started) for deficient metrics?
7.Was there open discussion to improve performance?
8.Was the entire team engaged in the process?

For each section rate the leader on a scale of 1-5:
1-Strongly Disagree 2-Disagree 3-Neutral 4-Agree 5-Strongly Agree

9. Insight

The lack of visibility cause that team do not know how to priorize the actions to continuouosly improve the process, Obeya create an environment to visualize the metrics per area and push the teamwork to analize from many points of view, actions be defined inmediatly and verified without delay, the process must be completed with accountability from the team members regarding the actions to solve problems.