In the spirit of the holiday season let’s have a bit of fun. In a previous post we wrote about standardisation and 5S as the foundation for supplier development. During the holidays I took my kids to watch Big Hero 6. It was a lot of fun and I would recommend it to anyone with kids. Always attentive to continuos improvement practises I was struck by the excellent example one of the heros (Wasabi) provides of demarcation. The clip below shows this in more detail.
In the picture below we see an example of demarcation on the floor. During the clip however we see the little hero (Hiro Hamada) of our story walking over the demarcation. At many factories I have visited demarcation is clearly indicated with colour coding, however, there is no indication of what the coding means. An important lesson here is that signposting should always be done by keeping the recipient of the message in mind. In this case Hiro would not be the tipical recipient of the message and therefore should have had some induction on signposting before entering the area.
The next picture shows an excellent example of a shadow board. Normaly shadow boards are mounted against the wall to save space. Wasabi comments: “A place for everything and everything in it’s place”. This is exactly what a shadow board does. It provides a system for organising the items that are required on a daily basis in the work environment.
I love the way Wasabi has even gone about demarcating the coffee cup with his milk and sugar requirements. Everything has been standardised in order to save time. Thank you Disney for this fun example of simple, and yet very effective continuous improvement.
