As every company knows, workplace information—production schedules, customer requirements, engineering specifications, operational methods, tooling and fixtures, material procurement, work-in-process, and the thousand other details on which the daily life of the enterprise depends—can change quickly and often. In any single day, thousands of informational transactions are required to keep work current, accurate, and timely.

But what happens when this vital information is hard to access, incomplete, inaccurate, or simply missing? People start asking a lot of questions, a lot of the same questions, repeatedly. An information-scarce workplace is the opposite of a visual workplace. When key information is not instantly available, the company pays for that in long lead times, late deliveries, poor quality, mistakes, accidents, low operator and managerial morale, and runaway costs.

When workplace visuality is not firmly in place, these unhappy occurrences are chronic and unrelieved. They happen all the time—day in and day out, week in and week out, year after year, and struggle becomes a way of life.

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