NEW! WORK THAT MAKES SENSE
Author: Dr. Gwendolyn D. Galsworth (more about the author)
Paperback Publisher: Visual-Lean® Enterprise Press (2011)

280 pages with 550 full-color photographs and 50 full-color figures & charts.

At last! A book that teaches how to go beyond 5S and train, implement, coach, support, and sustain visual inventiveness on the operator-level. This will be a must-read for all levels of the organization.

Work That Makes Sense (WTMS) is designed to speak directly to the real experts of day-to-day work in any company - front-line associates - showing them what a visual workplace is, why it's important to their daily work, and how to create one themselves. Based on nearly 30 years in the field, author Gwendolyn Galsworth, a foremost authority on workplace visuality, provides value-add associates with a methodology and hundreds of full-color actual visual solutions for converting their own work areas into visual workplaces.

In addition, she presents specific "callouts" to managers and supervisors for supporting and coaching these efforts. The result is visual improvements that are widespread and sustainable.

This level of imbedded visuality produces impressive gains in key performance indicators whether the work venues is a factory, hospital, bank, engineering office, military depot or open-pit mine. A 15% to 30% increase in productivity is the norm on the departmental level - along with high levels of employee empowerment and alignment with the corporate intent. Or as Galsworth puts it: a spirited and engaged workforce.

Across eleven well-written chapters and over 600 full-color examples, WTMS provides a clear and complete step-by-step protocol for transforming organizations into well-functioning visual workplace - and operators into visual thinkers of the first order. In fact, these thinkers are doers: employees who want, are able to, and do create hundreds, even thousands, of visual devices that let the workplace speak.

Operator-led improvement is not just a concept. This bottom-up approach to visual conversion paradigm literally turns a work culture upside down - giving operators control over their corner of the world - and producing impressive bottom-line gains that are sustainable. AS a result, the mindset of continuous improvement becomes a way of life in the enterprise.

Starting with the visual world we already know on highways, at airports, and throughout the community, WTMS draws close parallels between these settings and the world of work. Then, with a splendid array of full-color photographs and numerous "before and after" scenarios, the reader learns a set of organizing principles plus a step-by-step methodology for transforming an ordinary work environment into one that speaks.

The information is presented clearly, with compelling detail, and attributed photos of companies and operators for whom visuality has become a language and an organizing principle, with precision, speed and sustainability as reliable outcomes.

Learn to develop a visual workplace through the eight building blocks of visuality, the fourteen principles of smart placement, and the power of the visual where (automatic recoil). And if you think borders are just pretty colored lines around "stuff," you will be amazed and inspired by the examples you see of how this apparently simple concept can answer hidden questions, cut waste (defined here as motion: moving without working), and inspire solutions to workplace struggles through devices that are visual.

Chapters on Visual Mini-Systems and the Four Power Levels show people how to drill even deeper, moving them far beyond 5S into the world of robust visual information sharing. If there is one book to buy this year to advance your excellence journey, WTMS is it.

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About the Author: Dr. Gwendolyn D. Galsworth

Gwendolyn D. Galsworth, Ph.D., is an implementer, coach, and author who has spent nearly 30 years developing and applying the visual workplace principles, concepts, tools, and models. Considered by many the leading visual expert in the world today, Dr. Galsworth is the author of numerous books on strategic improvement and workplace visuality, including Visual Systems, Visual Workplace–Visual Order Associate Handbook, Smart Simple Design, and Visual Workplace–Visual Thinking, recipient of the Shingo Research Prize. She is president and founder of QMI/Visual-Lean® Institute.

A Shingo Prize and Malcolm Baldrige Examiner, Galsworth has helped hundreds of companies, large and small, accelerate their rates of transformation, strengthen cultural alignment and achieve long-term, sustainable bottom-line outcomes through workplace visuality.

Her clients include: Lockheed Martin, Hitchcock Industries, Parker Denison, Rolls-Royce/UK, Royal Nooteboom Trailers/Holland, Delphi Automotive, Alcoa Aluminum, Trailmobile/Canada, Crompton Greaves/India, Harris Corporation, Lifetime Products, MMR Medical Center, Seton Name Plate, TVS Sundaram Clayton/India, Rohm & Haas, Sears Home Services, Wilson Transformers/Australia, and United Electric Controls.

In the 1980s, Dr. Galsworth worked closely with Dr. Shigeo Shingo to develop, among many things, a western-based poka-yoke method; and with Dr. Ryuji Fukuda to adapt the CEDAC® method and Hoshin Kanri/X-Type Matrix Planning (policy deployment) for western audiences.

Dr. Galsworth holds a Ph.D. and has led American study missions to some of the world's finest production facilities, including those in Japan. She is a frequent keynote speaker on visual systems, strategic leadership, and cultural conversions and is currently completing her next book: Visual Leadership~When Executives & Supervisors Become Leaders of Improvement.