Yamazumi Charts

Yamazumi Charts are bright and colourful depictions of a manufacturing process. Go round any modern car factory and you'll find them pinned up to encourage the workforce. The process is shown as a vertical column, subdivided into areas each representing the steps in a linear process. It is no surprise to discover that the word "Yamazumi" literally means to "stack up".

1. The steps that really add value are coloured green

2, Essential but not productive steps are coloured in yellow

3. Wasted/unnecessary steps are coloured red.

The Yamazumi chart is a great visual tool to literally show where delays, wastage and blocks are happening in any manufacturing process. It has five key advantages:

1. It's visual. If a picture is worth a thousand words, it's worth a hundred thousand figures. Workers can immediately and intuitively see where the delays are coming from.

2. It's simple. Clarity is power. Who needs a management consultant's report, when a Yamazumi Board tells the story at a single glance.

3. It's inescapable. Hanging above the production line, the Yamazumi Board is a constant, perpetual exhortation to continuous improvement, or Kaizen.

4. It's public. This one can't go straight to the "circular file". The Yamazumi Board is in the open, glaringly so. With competitive work teams, this is a great motivator to positive performance improvement.

5. It shows the vital few opportunities that can change everything. Remember the Pareto Principle. 20% of all causes account for 80% of results. With a Yamazumi Board, you can see visually where the key constraints, the key roadblocks are. Magnify the power of your process by focusing on the "vital few". This is a key Six Sigma principle.

The Yamazumi board proves that simplicity really is power. Remember Occam's razor? The simplest solution is almost always the best. Find it.

Are you curious about where your life is going? Does it seem that the days just fly by, that hours slip past to become days and weeks and years? I get that feeling too. Where has all that time gone? What have I achieved?

Well I suppose it would be rather nice to know where my life went. Yet all those hokey old time management guides telling us to keep track of our daily activities just seemed to generate extra work, right? The journal become more important than the day it recorded; the system became more important than the product.

Well actually, the system is the product. The journey is the destination.

Six Sigma, the business philosophy that has given the world ultra-lean, 3.4 defects in a million manufacturing, teaches us that we value what we measure. It's that simple. Everyone loves the old truism that not everything that can be counted counts, while not everything that counts can be counted. True, but maybe we are all just using the wrong measurement system.

Go Yamazumi Go!

The Yamazumi board is a bright, colourful depiction of a manufacturing process. Go round any modern car factory and you'll find them pinned up to encourage the workforce. The process is shown as a vertical column, subdivided into areas each representing the steps in a linear process. The steps that really add value are coloured green, the necessary steps orange, and wasted time as red.

The same power that the Yamazumi chart has to identify blockages and waste in a manufacturing process can be applied to your own life.

Your Yamazumi challenge

I challenge you to make your own Yamazumi for a week. You can do this in a spreadsheet. Break your week down into 7 columns of 24 hours. The aim isn't to create work - so just give a one word summary (e.g. Lunch) and assign a colour to the chunk of time - in this case Yellow. Fill in the Yamazumi grid, hour by hour.

This may sound strange, but it will be just as eye-opening for you as for the workers on the Toyota production line. You'll be astonished at how little fully engaged productive time delivers quite impressive results. The sheer time taken on non-value add activities (sleeping, eating, washing, transport) will be revealed. Then (if you're anything like me), so much after-work time will be a sea of red - the surfing, TV watching, meandering phone conversations, the hours becoming days, the days months, and the months years....

Even the green activities may not be perfect. Every activity, however good, carries an opportunity cost. What could you have achieved in the time available? Unless something is the best possible use of your time - something you can only define for yourself in reference to your ultimate life goals - well, it's sub-optimal.

Don't beat yourself up. The Yamazumi just reveals how much potential lies untapped.

The results may astound you.

(c) WestOcean 2009