Leaderboard

Let us see the two approaches of Floor walking by management teams. Gemba : It is a Japanese word meaning "Real Place". Gemba Walk: Imagine, everyday you do our job routinely and life goes on. One day , you are doing your work and to your surprise, you find your project manager, portfolio manager or department head, SMEs come to your place and understand more about the work from you as how you go about doing it. This is what Gemba walk is all about. Here a focused effort is made on the part of the management team to understand how work is actually happening, from the operators/team members's perspective. What are the challenges that are there and what are the opportunities for improvement. MBWA: This is another approach of floor walking by management team. Here the focus is not specific to a particular activity or process or type of work, unlike Gemba walk. But it focuses on managers checking with employees on the fly, about the work they do and provide more often than not , some suggestions and do not indulge much in probing questions/queries. This often may not produce the necessary result. There are some differences between these 2 approaches. Examples of Gemba Walk: Imagine in an IT company, you are working in your desk. Your Technical architect, Solution Architect, Portfolio Manager, GL walks through the floor and have a discussion with you. You are explaining your application and convey the fact that multiple vendors are working on that project and you dont have control over the performance of the application as that part is not owned by your organisation. You say that Performance of few features is time consuming (and you are consuming those features for proceeding with your work). This is hampering your functionalities or work. Now you have given your observation, the management team(and other stakeholders) will take cognisance of this and will come up with some action plan. Examples of MBWA: Imagine you are in an IT company. The mgmt team along with other relevant stakeholders does a walk of the floor. They come to your place (hop over to your desk) and ask about how things are moving. You tell shift constraint (afternoon shift) as an issue due to lack of machine in the team. They suggest your lead to change your shift to day time (suggestions are made rather than with probing questions that can go address the root cause). The caravan goes and the next person is being asked for issues . Conclusion: Looking at both the approaches and their benefits , one can conveniently say that Gemba Walk is superior. There is something called Gemba Kaizen , which does help in continuous improvement as well.

Gemba and MBWA are fundamentally different even though they are used by two best manufacturing companies( Two big companies that are still practiced MBWA today : Hewlett Packard & Kingston Technologies) &MBWA is also called as Management By Wandering Around, in which managers spend most of their time in shop floor & initiate face to face interactions with key employee about the potential problems. In real cases, there is always conflict among three cases in shop floor operations.They are: 1.what's management thought process ( optimistic, imagined 100% success rate) 2. What's the actual process exhibiting(As Is condition, less than 100%) 3. What's the data log/data sheet represents(may be affected by human factors & results in data deviation in most cases) Employee involvement, approach to root cause identification & its analysis , scope for improvement & its action planning and implementaion are the major parameters, which diffrentiate Gemba & MBWA. The actual meaning of Gemba is the actual work place where the value is creating & it is process driven approach, whereas MBWA is unstructured appoach to hands on & direct participation of managers to interact directly with their subordinates or line leaders & exchanging information what is going on. It is an expert driven approach. Gemba involves all levels of employee in shop floor & extract latent data ( hidden data which is difficult to capture) by interviewing operators about the real problems along with suspected source of variations & empowered them in providing better solutions by involving them in brainstorming session. In real cases, it is difficult to identify real problems, it's root causes & mainly the sustenance of solutions without involving bottom level employee. For this, Gemba is one of significant methodology which involves people & management for the scope of improvent by observing, recording, inspecting the data through frequent visits to streamline & devaition free data (Ref S.No.1, 2 & 3) followed by root cause analysis, provision & frequent inspection of visual controls, frontline workforce involvement & empowerment for the sustenance of feasible & reliable solutions.