Gemba Walk
A gemba walk is a management practice: the manager in charge of a process goes to the place where value is created, watches the work as it is done and asks questions before acting. Gemba means "actual place" in Japanese; it is also spelled genba. The practice comes from the Toyota Production System, which speaks of genchi genbutsu: go and see on site. The term gemba walk comes from Western lean and spread after 2011 with James Womack's book Gemba Walks. The manager follows one case or one product from one end of the process to the other with the people who work in it. On the way, the manager looks for the waits, the rework and the waste that no report shows.
Goal
According to the Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI), the gemba walk is a management practice for grasping the current situation through direct observation and inquiry before taking action.
A report gives averages and lead times. It does not show the file waiting on a desk, the data keyed in twice or the spreadsheet an employee keeps beside the system to meet the deadline. The walk replaces an assumption made at the desk with an observed fact.
The walk prepares a decision: where to act on the process and where to start. The manager brings back a walk sheet that holds:
- for each step, the gaps between what should happen and what happens;
- the waste and the problems observed;
- the actions agreed with the team, each with an owner and a due date;
- the date of the follow-up walk.
Usage
When to use it
- A metric gets worse with no cause visible in the reports: go and see where the delay or the error arises.
- A process crosses several departments: follow one case from end to end where no head of department sees the whole.
- Before a value stream mapping: see the flow as it runs before drawing it.
- After a kaizen event or a new standard: check on site that the change holds.
- A manager takes up a new post: learn the unit's work somewhere other than in the dashboards.
- Office processes: the gemba is the data-entry workstation and the screen; the walk runs as it does on the shop floor.
- A team that dares to show its problems to management: without that trust, the manager sees a staged process.
When not to use it
- Requirements to elicit for a future system: run an observation.
- The cause is known and the team must design and test a change: run a kaizen event.
- A fully automated flow: read the system logs with a process mining tool.
Description
Gemba, genchi genbutsu and gemba walk
The gemba can be the shop floor, the counter or the data-entry workstation. In his foreword to Womack's book, John Shook translates genchi as "real place" and genbutsu as "real thing". In his reading, both terms stress empiricism. Toyota Europe sums up the principle: go and see the location or process where the problem exists in order to grasp it, confirm the facts, analyse the causes and solve it faster. Shook quotes Toyota chairman Fujio Cho, for whom a lean leader must "go see, ask why, show respect".
Art Smalley was trained at Toyota. He notes that Toyota does not use the term gemba walk. He sets the scheduled walk of Western lean against Toyota's genchi genbutsu.
| Scheduled walk | Genchi genbutsu | |
|---|---|---|
| Trigger | A fixed weekly or monthly date | A problem or a fact to understand |
| What the manager goes to see | The planned route with a list of standard questions | The exact place of the problem, the actual parts and the actual work |
| Place in management | An activity added to everyday management | The ordinary way of managing |
Smalley illustrates the difference with Taiichi Ohno. Ohno moved out of his vice-presidential office into a conference room next to the production control room. He had the wall between the two rooms removed. He could hear the conversations with the shop floor and went down as soon as he sensed a problem.
For Smalley, a scheduled walk is better than managing entirely from a conference room. The risk lies in confusing the walk with the principle: "If a manager completes a weekly gemba walk and considers the obligation fulfilled, the point has been missed." An organisation that is starting out can set regular walks. The manager also goes whenever an event calls for it.
Purpose, process, people
Value crosses departments on its way to the customer. Womack therefore recommends following a single product family, a design or a customer-facing process from start to finish across departments, functions and organisations. He recommends bringing together the people who touch the process. They walk together and discuss these themes:
- Purpose: what problem does the process solve for the customer?
- Process: how does it work in practice?
- People: do they take part in creating, sustaining and improving the process?
Running the walk
- Choose the flow and the question. The manager chooses a flow: a product family, a type of case, a customer request. The manager starts from a precise question, for example "why has the reimbursement time risen from 5 to 9 working days?". The manager announces the walk to the team and states its purpose. The team then organises itself so that the walk does not interrupt its work. A walk without notice looks like an inspection.
- Prepare the questions. The manager writes them in advance, drops any question that takes a yes-or-no answer and sorts the rest under the three themes. "What do you do when the prescription is missing?" teaches more than "Do you have all the documents?".
- Walk in flow order. The manager starts at the first step and follows the case to the last with the people who work on it. Flow order brings out the waste between two workstations. A tour department by department shows each department and loses the link between them.
- Look before asking. At each step, the manager watches a few cycles in silence. Then the manager compares what should happen with what happens. Where standardised work exists, it says what should happen. Faced with a gap, the manager asks why, then why again, as in the five whys.
- Record facts without names. The manager writes down each observation with the time, the step and a quantity. The manager observes the process without influencing it. Only a safety hazard justifies stopping the work on the spot.
- Agree on actions, then come back. The manager and the team settle on the actions. Each action gets an owner and a due date. The manager comes back once the due date has passed. The follow-up walk falls on a different weekday from the first: the process must hold at any hour and on any day.
The gemba of an office
In an administrative department, the work happens at a data-entry workstation, in an application and in an email inbox. The manager sits next to the person and follows a case on screen. The manager sees the open windows, the copying and pasting and the spreadsheet kept beside the system. The paper piles and the queues in the application are the office's inventory. A remote screen share shows the data entry. It does not show the tray of waiting files or the question put to the colleague across the desk.
Pitfalls
Counting walks. A dashboard counts the walks. It does not say what they changed. A manager who chases the count does the planned round and ticks the box.
Judging people. The Lean Construction Institute (LCI) points the walk at the process: the walk is not there to criticise an employee's productivity. If the manager reprimands a team member in front of colleagues, the team hides its problems at the next walk.
Fixing on the spot. A manager who solves a problem in front of the team acts before understanding the cause. The team also learns to wait for the manager's visit to solve its problems. The LCI asks the manager to take notes, leave, then return to the team with a plan.
Coming without a question. A manager who comes without a question sees what is already known and leaves reassured.
Not coming back. An action without a follow-up walk remains an intention. The team sees that the walk changes nothing and stops reporting its problems during the walk.
Boundaries with neighbouring techniques
| Observation | Gemba walk | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Elicit the requirements for a solution | Improve the observed process |
| Who observes | The business analyst | The manager in charge of the process together with the team |
| Deliverable | Elicitation notes and requirements to confirm | Observed gaps plus actions with an owner and a due date |
Observation watches the work to elicit the requirements for a solution. The gemba walk watches it to improve the process. The manager in charge of the process goes in person with the team.
The business analyst prepares the flow to follow and the questions with the manager. During the walk, the analyst keeps the walk sheet. When a gap calls for a change to the system, the analyst turns it into a requirement.
The route that Womack recommends follows a value stream. The walk therefore comes before value stream mapping.
The movements, distances and detours recorded during the walk feed workplace layout analysis and its spaghetti diagram. The eight wastes tell the manager what to look for at each step.
The walk finds the problem; the kaizen event deals with it. The event brings a team together for several days to change the process and measure the result.
AI considerations
Before the walk, an assistant prepares the questions. From the metrics and the starting question, it proposes open questions sorted under purpose, process and people. The manager keeps about ten. A list of thirty questions turns the walk into an interrogation.
After the walk, the assistant writes up the notes. It transcribes the voice notes, files each observation under its step and suggests which of the eight wastes it shows. It drafts a first version of the action list. The manager checks each observation against the notes taken on site: an assistant that completes an unfinished sentence invents a fact.
From one walk to the next, the assistant compares the walk sheets and flags the observations that recur. Management must rule on a problem recorded three times without action.
An AI-generated summary of the logs is still a report. It says where to look; the walk says why.
The notes, photos and recordings concern employees. The manager puts no names in them and sends nothing to an AI service that the employer has not approved. Art. 328b of the Code of Obligations (CO) limits the data an employer processes about an employee. The data must concern the employee's suitability for the job or be needed to perform the employment contract. The manager runs the walk on the employer's behalf: the manager's notes fall under art. 328b. Art. 26 of Ordinance 3 to the Employment Act (OLT 3) prohibits systems designed to monitor the behaviour of workers at their workstation. A camera that analyses their movements is such a system.
Examples
The walk sheet is the deliverable. This one follows a physiotherapy invoice through a health insurer in French-speaking Switzerland. The starting question: why has the reimbursement time risen from 5 to 9 working days?
| Step | What should happen | What happens | Waste | Why | Action, owner, due date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Receipt and scanning | Mail scanned on the day it arrives | A single batch at 08:00; the mail collected from the PO box at 11:00 waits until the next day | Waiting | In the afternoon the scanner handles the contract mail | Second run at 11:30; head of the mail room; D+14 |
| 2. Automatic reading | Fields read without correction | Out of 20 invoices observed, 4 with the physiotherapist's ZSR number misread | Defects | Old form filled in by hand | List of the practices that use it; provider relations manager; D+30 |
| 3. Session check | The system checks that a prescription covers 9 sessions at most | The clerk counts the sessions on the PDF and copies them into her own spreadsheet | Over-processing | The system does not link an invoice to the earlier invoices under the same prescription | Analysis of the check rule; system owner; D+45 |
| 4. Missing prescription | Electronic request to the practice | Paper letter; 38 invoices waiting in a tray | Inventory | No template for an electronic request | Email template for the practice; team leader; D+10 |
| Follow-up walk: D+15 for steps 1 and 4, D+50 for steps 2 and 3 | |||||
The "What happens" column holds facts with figures: 38 invoices, 4 misreadings out of 20. It names nobody. The monthly report showed only that the average reimbursement time had risen from 5 to 9 working days. The four causes disappeared into the average.
Visualisations
The route map places the walk on the invoice's route. It shows the walk in flow order. The three themes of the walk run along the whole route. At the missing-prescription step, the map sets what the report says against what the walk finds on site. The table after Smalley sets the scheduled walk against genchi genbutsu. The boundaries table separates the walk from observation. The walk sheet shows the deliverable.
Cost
| Dimension | Level | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Preparation | Low | Choice of the flow and the question, about ten written questions, notice to the team. |
| Execution | Low | On a single-site flow, the manager and two to four team members walk for one to two hours with no special equipment. A flow that crosses several departments and several sites brings in more people and adds travel. |
| Documentation | Low | A walk sheet and an action list tracked up to the follow-up walk. |
Tooling
A notebook or a walk sheet printed on A3 is enough. A stopwatch measures a cycle time or a wait. A floor plan is for tracing movements when the layout may be the cause.
A mobile phone photographs a pile of inventory, a board on the wall or a form. The manager asks the people present for consent and keeps faces out of the frame. Voice notes leave the hands free and are transcribed after the walk.
The team tracks the actions on a board posted near the workstations or in its task-tracking tool. For a digital process, a process mining tool reads the system logs and shows before the walk where the cases wait.
Sources
No standards body defines the gemba walk. It belongs to the industrial tradition of Toyota and lean.
- Lean Enterprise Institute, Gemba Walk, Lean Lexicon: the definition of the walk, the meaning of gemba, the route of a product family across departments and James Womack's three themes of purpose, process and people.
- Shook, John (2013), foreword to James P. Womack, Gemba Walks, 2nd edition, Lean Enterprise Institute, p. xiii to xv: the meaning of genchi and genbutsu, empiricism and Fujio Cho's phrase.
- Toyota Motor Europe, The Toyota Way: the genchi genbutsu principle of going to see the location or process where the problem exists.
- Smalley, Art, What Is a Gemba Walk?, Art of Lean: the Western origin of the term, the scheduled walk set against genchi genbutsu, Ohno's office and the risk of confusing the walk with the principle.
- Lean Construction Institute, Gemba Walk: open questions written in advance, notice to the team, analysis of the process rather than of the people, walking in flow order and the follow-up walk.
- Ohno, Taiichi (1988), Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production, Productivity Press; original Japanese edition, 1978: the production system that the walk comes from.
- Swiss Confederation, Ordinance 3 to the Employment Act (OLT 3), SR 822.113, art. 26: the ban on systems designed to monitor the behaviour of workers at their workstation.
- Swiss Confederation, Code of Obligations (CO), SR 220, art. 328b: the limit that confines the processing of an employee's data to suitability for the job and performance of the contract.