Digitization of visual management boards in car repair shops results in more satisfied customers
Lean Management is about maximizing customer value and streamlining workflows by minimizing waste and variations. By streamlining the processes in your service center, you can offer better service to your customers so that they, among other things, do not have to wait so long to get their car back after service. Here’s how Volvo Cars used digital boards in their service centers’ daily operations management to streamline their workflow.
It should be easy to streamline day-to-day management
Mevisio's customized boards for Lean Visual Management are a favorite tool when it comes to streamlining day-to-day management. While the use of physical whiteboards is a good tool for improving the flow of information between different teams and departments, they are limited in everything from readability to the ability to pass on information to other departments and to store interesting statistics.
Switching to digital boards can sometimes be perceived as a risk. Will everyone feel comfortable using them? Will switching to a digital solution be like starting from scratch? Because we use the analogue whiteboards as a module to produce the digital version, those fears disappear.
Interactive whiteboards simplify daily management
We at Mevisio know that the structure around the daily meeting and the visual board is important for everything to flow smoothly. The visualization board is often the beating heart of the workplace - it is the first thing you see when you being the morning meeting. It is where you manage planning, the daily follow up of metrics, absence, deviations and improvements. With Mevisio and interactive screens, information becomes clearer while being stored and can be reused when and where it’s needed. And as a bonus, you avoid the hassle of bad dry erase pens. These benefits are the reasons behind eliminating all physical whiteboards to streamline the daily management.
More than just a whiteboard
The solution we have developed is reminiscent of the structure of a physical board for daily management although it is digital. However, it can contribute much more to your day-to-day operations than a physical board can. You have access to the board through all your digital devices and you can always see the status of important key figures and activities as well as attendance and sick leave, no matter where you are. In the area of continuous improvement, the digital board also means that data can now be collected and used for an analysis. That functionality is simply not possible with an analogue board. It is also much easier to report the status of key figures because it happens automatically. Sending a question to another team or to the management is easily done directly with your fingers on the interactive screen.
How to get started quickly with Mevisio
Do you also want to digitize your board for daily management? In the search for the right system, it is important that you think about what can be improved based on your existing boards, so that the board becomes something more than just a digital copy of the old board. The Mevisio platform works globally and can be adapted to your needs. This is an important aspect if you are looking for a system that works equally well in all sites around the world.
Before you start the global rollout, it is good to have tested the system properly at a few different sites to get feedback and improvement suggestions. Just like everything else in Lean, of course, the boards must also be continuously improved.
Being able to roll out an update to all your boards at once is a great advantage with Mevisio. This makes it possible to increase the pace of improvement and strengthen your competitiveness all over the world in a much shorter time.
Next step: integrate the board with other systems!
Volvo Cars uses digital boards for daily management in hundreds of workshops around the world where all information is entered manually as a first step. Our experience of letting users entering data manually as a start is that it helps in the transition from analog to digital. A further step however in the streamlining work is to integrate the digital board with other systems and tools within the company, so that the manually entered data from the board is automatically transferred and used in other systems. In this way, more people can take part in, analyze and work with all important information from the workshops. The integration also works in the other direction, so that all boards, for example, always show fresh information about customer satisfaction. In this way, everyone gets direct feedback on the outcome of improvement activities
Do you want to know more about our experiences from rolling out visual management globally? Book a demo and we will share more of our experience.
This video shows how the Swedish pilot site Volvo Bil in Gothenburg uses their digital daily management boards.
