Why quick plant floor walks miss key insights: The case for focused observation

When you walk the plant floor, can you truly see what’s occurring around you just by looking? 

I recently read about Harvard Art History professor Jennifer L. Roberts's required paper on a single artwork of her student’s choosing. The students must physically visit the artwork in a museum and spend three hours observing it before a single paragraph can be written. The professor herself did this with John Singleton Copley’s painting, Boy with a Squirrel. She took 9 minutes to see that the shape of the boy’s ear matched the ruff of the squirrel’s belly. In 45 minutes, she determined the folds and wrinkles in the background curtain perfectly matched the shapes of the boy’s ear and eye. 

This story took me back to my own art history class at the University of South Carolina. And although my memory of the art and the assignments have faded, the experience is still with me on the plant floor.

Learning and understanding require time and patience. In the daily hustle, we may mistakenly assume that a quick plant floor walk provides visibility to the opportunities. However, just because we look does not mean that we truly see. And let’s not forget that we apply filters to those observations with preconditioned meanings. For more information on this filtering, google “Ladder of Inference.”

Taiichi Ohno, a driver of the Toyota Production System, deemed his method for focused time on the plant floor as the “Chalk Circle.” In a plant area of interest, out of the workers' physical way, a circle would be drawn on the floor using chalk. An assigned individual would be required to stand in the circle for several hours to observe the nearby activities.

Having taken this approach myself, I’ve found what you can discover and rectify amazing. You see things that reports can’t tell you, such as continuous minor equipment stops due to operator training issues, a maintenance technician improperly performing a PM, or communication issues between departments.

• In a bottling plant, I observed a cartoner that was out of time, drifting off the zero baseline settings. The operator fought the machine, and production suffered. A review of the PM provided an opportunity to make changes to the maintenance process. Within weeks, the machine’s efficiency went from 65% to 93% consistently.
• Standing near the operator interface for a process line, I observed a relief operator change the process parameters when the primary operator went on break. In that process, it would take 45 minutes before the change impacts were seen in the packaging room. Meanwhile, the primary operator would return after 20 minutes and reset the process parameters back to the original settings. The packaging room would have to adjust the machines to stabilize the room output on both sides of the change. Looking across the eight-hour shift, you could see four process changes from the steady-state operation, causing seven changes in the packaging room. These swings occurred at the shift start when the primary operator took over from the previous shift and when the relief operator filled in for breaks and lunch. When questioned, each operator had their own approach to running the line, where “it felt good” to them. The fix was enforcing standard recipes with set process parameters, creating the “one right way” to run the process.
• In an aluminum smelting operation, I watched a production operator struggle to meet the numbers. Maintenance added a safety interlock that forced the operator to move outside the normal work envelope to keep the equipment running. At the time, the operators did not feel empowered and dealt with it. Simply relocating the interlock mechanism alleviated the issue and still addressed the safety requirements.

Many organizations perform Gemba walks, where people walk a prescribed plant floor route individually or in groups, making casual observations for improvements. However, those simple viewings will miss the findings that come from the more detailed chalk circle exercises.

Early in my career, a plant manager taught me that as a manager, it is imperative to schedule time on the plant floor—not just walking the same path from the office to the maintenance shop for the morning meeting but hitting the floor from different doors, alternative routes, across shifts, and with varying people.

Have the patience to stand in a chalk circle for an extended period, observe what occurs on the plant floor, and observe the interactions, processes, and communications. Your findings will likely surprise you.