How to Apply Toyota Best Practices at Your Marina
A Toyota engineer, Taichi Ohno, led the development of the Gemba Walk. Gemba is Japanese for “the real place.” He is considered to be the creator of the Toyota Production System, which became Lean Manufacturing in the United States. Since then, the Gemba Walk has been applied across many industries besides automotive manufacturing. This same methodology can be applied to best practices at your marina.
What is a GEMBA Walk?
At its heart, the Gemba Walk is a tool to give managers and executives a chance to visit the production floor, as opposed to managing from an office or boardroom. The most public instance of this is the CBS reality show “Undercover Boss.” Executives and managers are given a chance to get down and dirty in “the real place.”
Managers visit the work area and can see firsthand how their products are built or how services are provided. They can address current challenges and find opportunities for improvement. Its aim is very specific: to view the current state of a particular process, procedure, or practice.
How can the Gemba Walk be applied to your marina?
As a daily tool the Gemba Walk can be very effective. It allows a manager to observe employees, to see how they follow procedures, if they are following their training, as well as employee interactions with their customers. In some cases, it also gives the manager an opportunity to directly interact with customers and vendors.
During a Gemba Walk, the manager asks in-depth questions about processes being observed:
- Who is involved?
- What materials are involved?
- What do you do?
- How do you know what you do?
- When does the task take place?
- What depends on the outcome?
Apply the Gemba Walk to specific areas of your operations, such as:
- safety,
- human resources/training,
- customer service,
- logistics,
- inventory,
- maintenance, and
- vendors, etc.
Don’t try to address all areas of your business at once. Doing so will cause you to lose focus and your efforts will be watered down.
What are some specific examples?
Every marina has unique operations, amenities, and needs. However a few common areas are:
- Observe your customers as they arrive at your marina. How do they approach their boats and disembark from their slip? Do you have greeters and/or carts for customers to haul their equipment? Should you?
- If you have a fuel dock, watch what happens when a customer fuels up his vessel. Is it safe and efficient?
- If you have a restaurant, pay attention to the interactions between the server and the customer. Is it the type of customer service you strive for at your marina?
What is the point?
The focus is on finding problems in the process and identifying the point of failure that causes the problem, not the person responsible. During the Gemba Walk, don’t judge or give advice. Ask open-ended questions. You might get surprising answers, and employees are more likely to be candid when you are in their domain.
What do you do after the Gemba Walk?
After the Gemba Walk, take time to reflect on your observations and plan a time for discussion among your management staff. If there are challenges or opportunities, implement a Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle, and delegate tasks as needed.
Most importantly, employees can feel that you don’t care about their needs if you ask for ideas but do not implement them. With that being said, not all ideas are feasible. To prevent your employees from feeling like the exercise is futile, always follow up on all ideas and be as transparent as possible to gain understanding.
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