Production floor signage is essential for any company that cares about even the basics of occupational health and safety and employee safety. Marking communication routes, transport routes, storage areas, hazardous materials, and machinery is now a common standard. However, some companies go beyond this standard and excel. What does a broader perspective on marking in a production facility entail?

We still tend to treat safety as an expense. Protecting our employees from accidents requires incurring costs. However, well-planned and designed visual management is an investment that not only improves safety but also reduces production costs. How is this possible? 

More than stickers 

Horizontal and vertical markings aren't just standard stickers that need to be affixed somewhere. They're an entire system designed to streamline production processes. Examples?

Tool shadow boards ensure that employees have all the necessary tools at hand. This allows work to be done faster and more efficiently, generating savings. At the same time, we minimize employee movement within the facility, improving safety and reducing employee time wasted on unnecessary movement and searching. Safe = economical.

Another example is a minimum stock marking system or workflow instructions for individual workstations. These ensure that employees spend the maximum amount of time at their workstation and receive all supplies just-in-time. The same applies to sample templates, which allow for immediate assessment of the product or semi-finished product's compliance with the standard.

Each of these elements individually has a positive impact on work quality and safety, but only when applied together and comprehensively do they enable the implementation of real and tangible change. This is what we mean by Visual Management. How can we approach this issue comprehensively?

Visual Management Step by Step

1. Conduct an audit. Consider the plant's procedures and management and control systems. Consider where there are gaps in the production process and which elements you would like to optimize.
2. Analyze each point individually. What can you do to make the employee's work easier? How can you ensure procedures are followed? How can you ensure that employees understand the rules of conduct when machinery is started or malfunctions occur?
3. Visualize the whole. Visual management must be visible, comprehensive, and coherent. Mark the individual labels on the mockup. Consider whether they will be understandable and intuitive, and whether they will conflict with each other.
4. Match your products – choose their shape, quality, and durability based on the space's requirements. A product hanging on a wall must have a different level of resistance than one that a forklift will drive over. Don't skimp on quality, but don't overpay where it's unnecessary.
5. Provide training and onboarding. Make sure employees understand the signage and know how to navigate the newly organized space.
6. Plan your installations. Ensure that marking the space doesn't affect downtime. The plant must operate and production processes must continue uninterrupted, so installations should be as minimally invasive as possible.
7. Measure, test, and validate. Even the best design sometimes requires adjustments. After all, it's supposed to work in practice.

 

This is precisely how we approach working with our clients. We begin with detailed audits, then create designs and visualizations, provide training and advice, and finally produce, deliver, and install horizontal and vertical signage.

The result is greater employee comfort and safety, the elimination of waste, and higher quality processes and, most importantly, products themselves. A visually well-designed production facility is a safer and more economical place, and this is precisely what every factory manager and owner values.