Visualization – A picture says more than thousand words

Challenge & Selection

We were at one of the government’s transport aircraft manufacturing unit for requirement sign off. The  As-Is and To-Be had been detailed out. We were supposed to get the sign off to start the design and  implementation phase for PLM (Product Lifecycle Management).

During As-Is, everyone was busy saying how they are the only one because of whom the company is  running. Nobody was able to paint the big picture. For Voice of customer capturing, it was the wish list  every stakeholders and team members had in the mind.

During meeting for the sign off, all of a sudden, one of the major stakeholder siad – this document of  yours is “English”. We were surprised and said yes the communication and documentation was to be  done in English.

Application

We gathered together, brainstormed and agreed – the core team members are not able to visualize the  big picture. We painted the overall process. Below is a small snippet of one of the them. The customer  name and some of the process name has been masked.

To define the solution we decided that lets first ask the core team members only three questions:  1.What Job they perform, 2. Outcomes expected from that role and 3.constraints which they have or  face while execution of the job. The flow and the job of each functional department was put into a swim  lane diagram. This was then further detailed out.

This diagrams when explained brought everyone on the same page. Everyone had an appreciation of  other’s work. It also made our life simpler in mapping their process on our product, proposing the  improvement in their process through our proposed solution.

Insight & Approach

The learning for the whole team was to understand the customer and make them understand their  process we need to put together a big picture for the overall process. Help them understand the role,  their work and its significance in the bigger picture.

While doing the Value Stream Mapping (a visual tool quite used in manufacturing world specially or  started in automotive), you can remove non valued added activities and optimize the process. The visual  depiction of the process flow helps to discover all the relevant and non-relevant activities people  knowingly or sometimes unknowingly perform without realizing that the cost incurred for the non- valued activity is not paid by their customers.

As also stated in module 1 video 6 – visualization helps us to unlock the potential of our right side of  brain to explorer more possibilities.

A picture is more powerful than thousand words. It also helps all the parties to communicate (remember  communication is always bi-directional) in one language, one understanding and removes the  ambiguities.

