Polyhedrika

The Obeya room is a "war room" used by process improvement teams to meet and solve critical multi functional problems.  The room walls are lined up with boards, highly visual charts and graphs showing program timing, milestones and progress to date and countermeasures to existing timing or technical problems.  The team meets in this room regularly but team members can also visit the room, which is fully dedicated to the project, throughout the day. What is an Obeya? Obeya Room Benefits Remove organizational barriers Visual management by displaying all relevant data required in the improvement project Encourage a collaborative environment through regular meetings Implement quicker, more effective solutions The whole team knows what is going on in real time Some Practical Constraints in the Implementation Some companies can't afford the luxury of a fully dedicated room Some of the team members may be located far away so they will only attend the meetings The data displayed ...

    A still picture of a Value Stream Map may not fully explain the behavior of the Value Stream. In some cases we need to understand its dynamic behavior. To do this we will convert our Excel Value Stream Map into a Monte Carlo Simulator. In Excel Value Stream Map we saw how a complex Value Stream could be mapped using Excel. We saw the importance of mapping feedback loops such as test-repair loops because they often become the bottleneck for the complete value stream. In this situation not all items flow along all branches so we need to calculate the % flowing along each branch. This enabled us to calculate the cycle for each workstation based on the staffing. Finally we were able to calculate the ideal staffing to balance the line: insure no workstation cycle is above the average inter-arrival time (takt time). This we did using Solver. Value Stream Map: Still Picture Vs Dynamic Behavior Mapping the current value stream with a VSM is a good starting point to understand how...