Why Visual Management?

Abstract

From early on, visual management (VM) has been an intrinsic ingredient of the Toyota Production System (TPS) and its derivatives like lean production. Akin to the evolution of most other parts of the TPS, it has been developed through practitioner efforts rather than being propelled by theoretical insights. Recently, scholars have started to create a theoretical knowledge base for VM. Besides taxonomies of visual devices and their functions, there is only one fully fledged theory of VM, based on the concept of affordance. It is contended here that the scholarly field of visual management has been too narrowly defined. In fact, research on (or bearing on) visual devices has been carried out in several other, mostly small fields, often with little mutual awareness. A review on the theoretical explanation of VM is provided, based on this wider literature. The concept of affordance has been used in this context already in early 1990s. This focuses attention especially to the human cognitive capabilities and corresponding features of visual devices. Generally, VM is argued to provide a more rapid and reliable mode of communication in comparison to traditional alternatives. VM is thus compatible with the lean tenets of time compression and variability reduction. This explains its central role in lean production.

The Role of Digitalized Visual Management to Empower Selfmanaged Crews in Construction Projects

“…The use of the early stages of VM can be tracked to the beginning of the twentieth century, when the Gantt chart was used for production control in 1917 (Moris 1994). The reported good results in the adoption of different VM devices in the manufacturing industry (Sugimori et al 1977;Shingo 1989;Galsworth 1997) encouraged researchers and practitioners from the construction industry to adapt and transfer VM knowledge to construction projects (e.g., Koskela 1992;Formoso 2002;Tezel 2009;Koskela et al 2018).…”

“…Nevertheless, even with positive results, the research and practice on the topic is in very initial stages, and studies continue to highlight the centralized nature of the construction industry and the silos that characterize its information management (Dave et al 2008;Tezel et al 2016;Koskela et al 2018). Once again, aiming to assess the research development inside the lean community, the search engine of the IGLC website was used to search through all published papers at the 27 international conferences.…”

“…VM as a part of lean thinking has been an important management approach to increase information distribution, bring more transparency to the construction site and enable pull production approaches with more simple and targeted communication devices (Koskela et al 2018). The adoption of traditional VM brings benefits that have been measured in different case studies (Tezel et al 2013(Tezel et al , 2016.…”

Continuous Improvements at Operator Level

“…During the workshop, visual management was discussed in the construction context, referring to "why" manufacturing had opted for visual management (VM) through years. Koskela et al (2018) argued that "Mental operations, such as communication and decisionmaking are strictly seen waste in production; they are not adding value to the customer. Through VM, communication and decision-making can be sped up."…”

Implementing Lean Visual Tools on the Closeout Phase of a Globalscale Industrial Project

“…Moreover, there are many studies that have been conducted on improving the communication by using different tools and methods. Among these, visual management as a lean tool is proven to improve the communication and decision making in managing processes (Koskela et al 2018). This is especially evident on projects that have language barriers, as visual management has shown to facilitate the communication on jobsites to improve the health and safety of the workers (Bust et al 2008).…”