Visual management as a tool for production site management

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The effectiveness of visual management largely reflects a company’s level of on-site management. Visual management is highly useful both on-site and in the office. On the basis of understanding its key points and standards, extensive use of visual management will bring significant benefits to an enterprise’s internal management. 　　1. Visual management is a management method that induces changes in people’s awareness through vision. 　　2. Three key points of visual management: 　　① Anyone can determine whether something is good or bad (abnormal). 　　② Judgments can be made quickly with high accuracy. 　　③ The judgment results do not vary from person to person. 　　In our daily activities, we perceive things through the “five senses” (sight, smell, hearing, touch, taste). Among them, the most commonly used is “visual”. According to statistics, 60% of human actions begin with visual perception. Therefore, in business management, it is important to ensure that various management states and methods are clear and straightforward, so that everything is \"easy to understand at a glance.\" This makes it simpler to comprehend and follow these guidelines, allowing employees to fully understand, accept, and carry out their tasks on their own initiative, which brings significant benefits to management. 　　Let’s start with a few simple examples:
· Traffic lights used in roads – stop at red, go at green.
· Water dispensers – the red button indicates hot water, while the blue button indicates cold water.
· A small piece of cloth tied to an exhaust fan; when the cloth moves, it indicates that the fan is in operation.
In today’s world where goods are in excess, manufacturers need to meet consumers’ needs in various ways. As a result, they are forced to produce a variety of products in small quantities with short delivery times, which increases the difficulties associated with managing operations on-site and handling physical products. As a management technique, visual management enables all employees in a company to reduce errors and carry out various management tasks more easily. 　　Some domestic companies have made significant progress in visual management; they not only apply it more extensively in the work environment but also implement it on their products, thereby providing convenience for customers. For example, computers have many interfaces of various shapes – round, flat, long, square – to prevent incorrect insertion. On the computers purchased by our company some time ago, not only are the interfaces of different shapes, but they are also of different colors; the plugs of the connection cables match those colors as well. In this way, it’s fast and accurate just by looking at the colored plugs. Fast and accurate – \"high efficiency and low error rate\" – are precisely the outcomes achieved by visual management in many situations. 　　A people-oriented approach to work: Once, I went to a beer manufacturing company to provide guidance. When I saw over a hundred valves of various sizes on one of the equipment units, I asked the operator whether he could keep track of when each of these valves needed to be closed or opened. He replied that he could. I’ll ask again if there have been any cases of incorrect opening or closing. The answer is occasionally. That’s right; I wouldn’t believe anyone who says it never existed. The workshop supervisor told me that new workers who come here to work get nervous just by seeing all these valves – they stay nervous for a whole month! Many of our managers talk a lot about putting people first, but what does that really mean on the job site? True commitment to putting people first means enabling our operators to carry out their tasks more easily and accurately, with little increase in costs. The same is true for instruments; when a person is faced with dozens of them, managers simply cannot expect the operators on site to remember what levels represent normal conditions and what levels indicate abnormal conditions.