If you are a manufacturing organization striving for excellence – and what manufacturing organization isn't – "obeya" is a concept you may want to add to your repertoire. Analogies have been drawn between an obeya and the bridge of a ship, or a war room and even a brain, but the straightforward definition is much simpler. Strictly speaking, "obeya" – sometimes spelled oobeya – is a Japanese word that simply means "big room." In practice, it's much more.
Obeyas provide dedicated space as well as time for coordination and problem-solving, and are designed to minimize organizational barriers, explains Sam MacPherson, executive director of the Lean Leadership Academy. Visual management is a key, with obeya walls typically plastered with charts, tables, and other data or communications for team members to review and act upon. Moreover, he adds, an obeya is a collaborative environment. The end result: quicker, more effective solutions.
"If you think of TPS [Toyota Production System] as being a nervous system, then 'obeya' is actually the brain of the system," describes MacPherson. "It is where that information comes to be synthesized, and digested, and then analyzed, prioritized and decisions made about what are we going to do with this information."
Manufacturing companies like Timken, Toyota, Volvo Group and others employ obeyas as valuable contributors to their lean enterprises.
What an Obeya is Not
An obeya is not a process island. Simply putting all of your engineers in a single, big room does not an obeya make, MacPherson says. Is there collaboration? Are there visual management tools? It matters.
By the same token, a glass-walled room studded with monitors displaying and rotating real-time data every 30 seconds also doesn't qualify as an obeya if it isn't used routinely to collaborate and manage the business. While the room may be visually eye-catching, that may be all it is.
On the other hand, there's the Timken Shiloh plant in Rutherfordton, N.C. Smack in the middle of that facility is an operations obeya, although Timken calls it the operations center or command center. Converted from a training room, the central location means that anyone who needs to be there can reach it in three to five minutes.
Timken's Shiloh plant has been engaged in a lean transformation for about six years, an initiative spurred by a business need to meet sudden growth in its super precision products. The obeya is a piece of that larger lean implementation, and it has been used at the site for more than four years. The Timken Honea Path plant in South Carolina launched the obeya concept earlier this year, and both facilities have received training from MacPherson's Lean Leadership Academy.
When Shiloh operations manager Robert Porter discusses obeya, he's quick to emphasize that first engaging the leadership, from the top to the team leaders, in learning, understanding and embracing lean principles was critical to the success of any specific efforts that followed.
The objective – or prime directive – of Shiloh's obeya is straightforward: Meet today's production requirements today. Cross-functional leaders meet three times daily in the obeya on a schedule to review how the plant is doing and to initiate countermeasures if things go awry. The meetings are short, Porter says, and consume perhaps 45 minutes of the day in total.
A few important points:
• As mentioned previously, obeyas are the ultimate in visual management. At Shiloh, data is delivered to the command center in a chain-of-custody fashion. Production operators log required data in their zone; that data is validated by the team leader. The group leader then is responsible for checking the team leader's thinking and logging the data in the obeya. Porter says the system creates synergy and "forces the engagement on an hourly basis ... the team leader is touching the operator, the group leader is touching the team leader, and there's a matter of checks and balances. But it's also coaching, thinking, helping to drive problem solving."
• Porter takes a critical point gemba walk every day. His first stop is the command center. "I can quickly -- very quickly -- determine if I'm on schedule everywhere or, if I'm not on schedule, where am I not on schedule and why am I not on schedule," he says. Stop two is any place there is a deviation.
• While decision-making, guidance and "check your thinking" activities occur in the obeya, Porter says the goal is to keep the problem-solving efforts at the point of occurrence, meaning at the gemba.
How well has a holistic lean implementation served Timken Shiloh? Well enough that productivity improves year over year, even in down years. Well enough that Timken's Honea Path plant is pursuing a similar course. "What we saw at Shiloh is they had rigorous management, leadership and cadence around processes that delivered results, and so obviously we wanted that to be the case for us," says Randy Dunn, plant manager at the Honea Path Timken m