Transcription
Hello, it's Ryan Tney from Lean Made Simple. I'm just back from a recent trip to Japan. My head is actually spinning. I have so much information that I want to get out, 'cause this was my fourth time there, and every time I go to Japan, I learn this stuff at a deeper level.
So, one of my biggest takeaways was this concept of "miruka." Miruka is a Japanese word for visualization. The goal of really high-level Lean organizations, particularly in Japan, is that they want to see the status of what's happening at a glance. You know, they do want to ask loads of questions on, "How's production going?" "How many defects have we produced?" "Who's off today?" All the answers are right there in visual form.
We were in a company called Muni, the tier 2 supplier to Toyota, and the president of the company, Mr. Omura, I could see these like big visual boards just stacked against the wall. And I said, "What, what, what are, what are those for? What are they, what are they about?" And he said, "Miruka." And as soon as I seen this, I thought, "We need this at our company."
So we came straight back and we designed our first Miruka board. And I know that after you see this video, this will be a light bulb moment for you as well. This is the start of something huge at our company. We're going to go right around our company and make Miruka boards at every station to make work visual.
Okay, so this is our first Miruka board. So this particular board is for managing our design change notices. Before this was in somebody's head, it was on the computer, it was on a spreadsheet, but we couldn't see it visually at a glance. Now, anybody can walk into this office and see exactly what's happening.
So, just want to show you the detail here. So this is for managing our design changes. So we've just written the design change on a card. It's just magnetic at the back. The board is printed on a magnetic board. So we just write this on and we can see yellow means it's in progress. So we can clearly see that Colin is working on this. Uh, it's an Orlando cushion. We're extending it by 50 mil. So it's still in design. It's with production as well, but it hasn't been started in inventory department. But black means that it's not applicable. So in this case, marketing doesn't have to do anything, the customer doesn't need updated, and the database isn't updated yet. So this tells us everything that's happening at a glance.
So if you're watching this wondering how we actually made it, so we got our in-house graphic designer, Gary. Gary designed this up. We got it printed with our local print house. We printed it on a magnetic board, then we just bought these magnets from Amazon. So it's really simple. We done this whole thing in a couple of days.
And this is the start of something massive. We're going to visualize or have Miruka boards around our entire company for accounts, for marketing, for production, to, to let us know when people are off. We're going to visualize our entire company with this Miruka thinking.
So we were just in the middle of doing this video and Colin, our designer, actually suggested an improvement. So we're going to stop the video right now and make the improvement and come straight back to you. So we noticed that there wasn't a key. There was nothing to explain what the different colors mean on the board. Um, so I've drawn up a quick key, got it unlaminated a piece of card, and going to stick it on the board now. And that'll be our first improvement to the [Music] board.
So you've seen our first example of our Miruka board. Hopefully, this sparked some interest and hopefully got your brain thinking about how you could visualize things at your company. I think it's important to say as well that this, this doesn't necessarily replace the digital version, but we're making the important information visual. And in some cases, there will be a digital version in the background to back up the Miruka board. But the key is to bring the important information to the forefront and let everybody see at a glance what is happening.