Last segment we started with Sort, the activity of deciding what’s important to have around. The next step is to define an order to develop & maintain consistency. It’s not very lean to waste time & movement looking for the things you should have nearby. For many shopfloor work centers this may be having shadow boards or tool trays with custom cutout areas for the specific tools. I really like the board below. It’s got a system to see who “checked-out” the tool so you know where to look. Except for that pesky 10mm that always seems to be missing :-)
In our digital workspace we can organize in similar ways. Using the data management areas of SOLIDWORKS and 3DEXPERIENCE we can add metadata and tags to help us find the things we need to access quickly. We can use bookmarks, favorites and folders to have regularly used data a few clicks away. When it’s time to make changes, we can reserve or lock the data within PDM & PLM to ensure our team knows who is performing the task, also keeping anyone else from duplicating the effort.
Another practice that can be helpful in the digital space is to find ways to share organized data from a single source rather than sending copies with email, IMs and file drops. Using our technology to share links & access to the files is a more lean approach to keeping data & files tidy. SWYM communities are another way to organize and share information that typically wouldn’t make sense to store in data management. They allow for you to share with stakeholders that are interested in an area and can collaborate as needed to improve our digital work flows. And it’s searchable as well!
SORT, SET in order, and next time we’ll look at SHINE.
Check out the DELMIA Collaborative Lean Operations community on the public/commercial tenant to keep up with this content and much more!
