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What catches your attention on Gemba walks?
All supply chain professionals undertake Gemba walks from time to time, be it on the shop floor, in warehouses, or in vendors’ factories. How you describe your Gemba observations holds clue to the course of future improvements.
If you have noted your observations from the past Gemba walks, I suggest you go through them. I have discussed this point with many supply chain professionals and the findings are quite revealing.
Most of them notice stock pile up at certain locations in the factory and use it to identify the bottlenecks. It is a good starting point.
They also notice certain machines idling. How they describe it is interesting. They end up saying that many workstations don’t have enough workload and we must do something to load them.
Not a single person has told me that they saw certain workstations idling and they were happy about it! By the way, did you find this observation in your Gemba notes?
If a factory is running well, there should be stock pile ups before bottlenecks and other machines must idle from time to time.
This profound insight leads to improved flow!