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Obeya is often referred to as “Large room” in a project. The origin of this term was from Toyota in 1990s during their project G21, which led to the first generation of Toyota Prius. Takeshi Uchiyamada was appointed the Chief Engineer for the project, and he always felt that he lacked the required authority to make the right decisions and feared being overrun by more experienced department leaders, which may adversely impact the project. In order to ensure he had alignment from all stakeholders he constituted the “large room” – Obeya in Japanese – as an arena for discussions with the department leaders. This forum will have all the relevant stakeholder with relevant data and information to make decision making seamless. The concept of Obeya room was largely successful in Toyota, and hence they integrated it as part of Toyota Product Development System. Why is Obeya required for large cross functional projects – The biggest challenge in cross functional project is, the individual functions not seeing the big-picture of the how a new product or service will bring to the organization. They operate in silos, which in-turn results in lack of synergy between functions or department and result in project delays or failure. According to Shigeo Shingo: "People don't care what until they understand why." The organization vision and operational objectives well-articulated, gives meaning to the employees, which result in improved commitment and accountability for employees to act. Various tools like Hoshin Kanri are used to create alignment between activities, and to establish organizations vision, Individual and team goals. Obeya, helps to visualize Hoshin Kanri, and helps create a collaborative environment for cross functional problem sharing and decision making. In Obeya rooms (as explained in the above diagram), cross functional project teams can be focused on the project or organizations vision. Measure the success using KPIs, identify gaps in meeting KPIs quickly and follow a PDCA cycle (plan, do, check, act) to resolve issues, resulting in timely completion of projects with minimum resistance.

Obeya Room: Which was created by Toyata, which means “Large Room” in Japanese. Objective is to bring together cross functional leaders to focus on big picture issues on any of the initiative or project. Obeya room is called “War Room”, Since there would be many different voices from the functional leaders on the issues for given project or initiative We know in the real world, organizations have different departments like Information technology, Marketing, Human resources, sales and operations who works separately. And have their department goals to achieve by their expertise. But how they interlock to common organizational goals is very important and much needed for the business to be successful. Development of that vision must start at the top, which is why an obeya room brings together leaders from all the departments involved in a project An obeya room helps organizations to create value by bringing together managers across functions. An obeya is clearly a tool of teamwork: helping managers in various functions solve problems across their borders.”

Obeya, in Japanese means “large room”, involves bringing together various departmental leaders in the organization to focus on big picture issues involved with a single project or initiative. Creating an Obeya room is similar to creating a “war room,” a command center that brings together leaders from across departments in an organization. Basketball game offers a suitable analogy to Obeya. A basketball team has three-point shooters, defensive specialists, and mid-range shooters, those who work “in the paint” near the basket, and players who see the whole court well and distribute the ball to other players so they can score in match effectively. Each player has their own skill sets and work hard on perfecting them. However, to win, a smart coach practices the team together, building upon their skills to create an effective team. Philosophy behind obeya comes from Lean. Ultimately, everything must focus on how the final product – the result of different specialists working together – creates value for the customer. How this concept of ‘Obeya’ Originated ? This concept originated in Toyota while production of its one of its famous and innovative model i.e. Prius in 1990s. Chief Engineer of the G21 (Global 21st Century) project for Prius at Toyota, Takeshi Uchiyamada “felt that he lacked the necessary authority to make the optimal decisions, and thought he could be overrun by experienced discipline leaders in a way that was not optimal for the project as such”. He realized that to create the new car in a compressed timeline, he must integrate the efforts of diverse experts in engineering, design and production – everyone who had a contribution in the final product. Eventually, the meetings started to include people from the other domains too, such as representatives of marketing and sales. He met with leaders from each area two to three times a week, with the number of meetings increasing as the project deadline approached. Using the concept of Obeya, Prius reached the market 15 years ahead of the competition and remained a market leader in electric vehicles for over a decade. This huge success achieved using Obeya drew the attention of another industries and other Businesses leaders and they started using this concept in their respective organizations. Famous companies using the concept of Obeya now are : Toyota, Nike, Boeing, and Volvo. How Obeya is formed ? During the product and process development, all individuals involved in managerial planning meet in a "great room" to speed up the communication and decision-making process. This is intended to increase efficiency and bring a better information flow to the project. Often associated in product development, an Obeya room can also be a place for software development, a command center, managing new business strategy, workflow and project management during a new software or a business platform development. This tool motivates people to work together without any distractions and creates a great atmosphere to generate new ideas. Similar to traditional “war rooms,” an Obeya will contain visually engaging charts and graphs depicting such information as program timing, milestones and progress-to-date etc. . In some companies, they term it as an iObeya or Adrenaline Room. iOberya is a virtual digital Visual Management Platform which mimics the Obeya room atmosphere / layout virtually. Key components of the Obeya Room includes Charts, Graphs, A3 Sheets, Visual tools like signage, Labelling etc. Sample layout of Obeya Room as below : OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) for Obeya : i) Rapid Decision Making ii) Reduction of Rework iii) Avoidance of Unnecessary Discussions iv) Better Information Flow in Organization / Across Departments v) Quick Ideas Generation vi) Savings on Efforts and Cost vii) Removal or reduction of 7 kind of Wastes as per Lean (WORMPIT / TIMWOOD) and Waste of Intellect too Key Benefits to Organization post Obeya Creation : i) Improvement in Team Efficiency : A project’s leadership team can save time by bringing helpful visuals, necessary information, and vital resources together in one place which results in effective collaboration and resulting into team efficiency. ii) Focus : Having key team / functional members in the same room for discussions means that project leaders can focus on the right issues iii) Working Together : An Obeya fosters an environment in which employees can work together across the disciplines and in real-time, rather than connecting via e-mail or in rushed meetings Key areas those can be improved in an Organization using Obeya Concept : SLAs / KPIs Performance Customer Satisfaction Financial Performance Employee Satisfaction Infrastructure Improvement Technological Upgradations Employee Recruitment Timelines etc. Physical Obeya Limits : One drawback of the physical Obeya is that the Obeya Room is not suitable for an international team or remote working team. If someone can’t be there in-person, it becomes difficult to include them in the meeting via a webcam because the practicality of an Obeya Room is to interact live and view the different panels. So to sum up, given the above Obeya Benefits, its is imperative that organizations and specially the large organizations must use the concept of Obeya to improve the interdepartmental communications and to improve the decision making process. Since in large organizations, sometimes departments work in silos and information flow from one department to another is not proper which causes rework and delay in decision making too often. Hence it’s recommended that large organizations must use the concept of Obeya to improve the trust, focus, communication, work visibility, clarity of thought process etc. between the departments.