Gemba walks and why they still beat dashboards

A Gemba walk means going to the place where work happens and watching it with your own eyes. No dashboard, no weekly report, no secondhand summary. You go, you observe, you ask questions. That’s it.

When you’re looking for ways to improve a process, the boardroom is probably the worst place to start. Manufacturing operations represent about 8% of our conversations at Tallyfy, and I’ve learned that the best insights come from observing work where it actually happens. One protective coatings manufacturer shared that they needed a 12-point quality control checklist for every coating application - the kind of thing you only discover by watching the work happen, not by reading a procedure manual.

It’s easy to miss important details when you’re thinking about a process in the abstract.

Toyota figured this out decades ago. Taiichi Ohno, who created the Toyota Production System, was famous for drawing a chalk circle on the factory floor, making new engineers stand in it, and telling them to just watch. When he came back, if they hadn’t observed enough, he’d send them back to keep watching. His point was blunt: reports and spreadsheets can’t capture what your eyes can.

That philosophy became what we now call the Gemba Walk - a cornerstone of Lean and Six Sigma thinking. The word “Gemba” is Japanese for “the real place.” And visiting the real place where your business generates value is exactly the point. You spend time watching processes in action and asking the people doing the work questions about what they do, why they do it, and what’s getting in their way. Running Tallyfy taught us that even digital workflows benefit from this kind of direct observation - you can’t always see the friction points from a dashboard alone.

The information you gather during a Gemba walk becomes the foundation for any serious process improvement effort.

And even though the Gemba walk was born in manufacturing, it works for any type of process. Service businesses, knowledge work, healthcare, legal - doesn’t matter. If people follow a repeatable process, observing it in person will tell you things that no report ever will.

How to prepare for a Gemba walk

Walking around looking at things sounds simple. But to get real value from your time, you need a plan.

Build your observation team

One person can do a Gemba walk alone, especially in a smaller business, but it’s better to bring a small team. What you miss, someone else might catch. Different people notice different details.

Who should you consider? A manager who’s relatively unfamiliar with the process you’re studying - they’ll have fewer preconceived ideas and bring a fresh perspective. A supplier whose equipment or materials are used in the process, because they’ll know if things are being used correctly or efficiently. A sales representative who has direct contact with the people buying your product or service - they know what matters to the end user.

Brief your staff first

You don’t want the team under observation to feel uncomfortable with the Gemba walk. They need to know what you’re trying to achieve. Make sure they understand this isn’t a performance evaluation. It’s about processes, not people.

When you brief your staff, ask for suggestions. The people who physically do the work usually have the best insight into problem areas.

There’s a reason Toyota’s philosophy emphasized developing people before developing products. The person running a machine eight hours a day has probably figured out three ways to do it better, but nobody ever asked. Most organizations squander this kind of insight. They treat frontline workers as task executors rather than problem solvers. A Gemba walk done right flips that assumption. You’re not just observing - you’re mining decades of accumulated wisdom from the people closest to the work.

The message you’re trying to get across is simple: “We’re taking a fresh look at how this process works. There are no wrong answers. We’re not here to judge.”

Define what you want to achieve

“Process improvement” is vague. What specifically are you hoping to fix? Maybe you’d want to:

• Find ways to save time
• Address quality issues
• Reduce costs
• Improve workplace safety
• Reduce any of the seven wastes of Lean
• Improve service delivery and end-user experience

And know this - a Gemba walk isn’t the same as Management by Walking About (MBWA). MBWA is much less focused. It doesn’t involve the depth of observation and open-ended questioning that makes a Gemba walk useful.

Follow the work from start to finish

There’s no better way to observe a process than following it from the moment work begins all the way through to a finished product or service delivery. Transfer time - the gap between one team handing off to the next - and queue time after handover are probably the most fertile ground for improvement. The best way to spot bottlenecks is to follow the flow from start to finish. Some practitioners call this “process stapling.” You mentally staple yourself to a work item and follow it everywhere it goes. A purchase order, a complaint, a new hire’s paperwork. Whatever it is, you track it through every desk, every inbox, every approval queue. You watch it sit and wait. You see who touches it and for how long. This is different from interviewing people at their stations - when you follow the actual work, you catch things nobody mentions because they’ve stopped noticing them. That twenty-minute delay while someone hunts for a signature? It’s become invisible to the people living it every day.

During the walk, stay focused on the process. You’ve told your people you’re not there to criticize them or their work. Don’t gather data for a performance evaluation. I know this can be hard when you notice someone slacking off, but if you start finding fault, you’ve lost their engagement. And without engagement, you get polished answers instead of honest ones.

Ask the right questions using the 5 Ws

Try to approach the process as if you knew nothing about it. You might find that people have unofficially tweaked the standard procedure for one reason or another. So even if you think you know how things work, set that aside.

All your questions should be open-ended. Yes or no questions are out. You want people to elaborate.

Who? Who is involved in this part of the process? Who sets the work in motion? Which role does which task? Who takes over when this step is complete?

What? What inputs do you receive? What do you do with them? What could be done differently? What factors cause delays or waste?

Where? Where do materials or inputs come from? Where is the work performed? Where do your outputs go? Where are tools and equipment located? Movement doesn’t add value, and it takes time, so you want to limit it as much as possible.

When? When do you receive process inputs? When do you find yourself waiting for something you need? When are you able to begin turning inputs into outputs? When does the next sub-process begin?

Why? Why do we perform this step? Why in this specific order? Why is it important to the people who depend on the output?

Log everything and resist changing anything

Your Gemba walk will produce a mountain of information. Observations that seem trivial at the time might turn out to be critical later. Record everything electronically if you can - you and your team can share notes, collate them, and figure out where action’s needed. A camera helps too. If you notice that equipment layouts could be improved, photographs linked to notes make the case much stronger than memory alone.

And this is the part most people struggle with: don’t implement changes during the walk. Collect suggestions, absolutely. But don’t make decisions on the spot. You need the big picture first. What looks like a great idea at sub-process one may look terrible once you’ve seen sub-process ten.

From what I’ve seen working with process improvement teams, the biggest obstacle is often what people think they already know. A law firm we worked with had employees memorizing over 100 process steps for estate proceedings - and work was frequently slipping through the cracks because the actual workflow had diverged from what management assumed was happening. The question we get asked most often with workflow automation, this disconnect between assumed process and real process is almost universal.

After the walk, give your employees feedback. They gave their insights and suggestions - they deserve to know what you found. Explain why certain changes were adopted. If you decided against certain suggestions, explain why. Recognition matters.

And follow up with another Gemba walk after making changes. Your stats might look good, but stats can be misleading. The only way to know if your improvements are working is to go back to the floor and see for yourself.

Turn Gemba observations into real process changes

Templates for processes you might observe during a Gemba walk

Example Procedure

Warehouse Delivery Receiving & Inspection Workflow

1Receive and log incoming shipment

2Create receiving log entry

3Verify shipment against purchase order

4Conduct damage inspection

5Sign delivery confirmation and document receipt

+2 more steps

View template

Example Procedure

Print Production & Quality Control Workflow

1Initial Print Job Setup

2Configure Print Properties

3Submit Print Request

4Review File and Specifications

5Get Cost Approval If Needed

+2 more steps

View template

Knowing what to change is just the start. The hard part’s figuring out how to capture, communicate, and implement those changes without breaking adjacent processes.

This is where most improvement efforts fall apart. A change to one process can ripple into others - a production change might affect the sales process, and if you’re not paying attention, you’ve created a new problem while solving the old one.

Here’s where I think the AI conversation is worth having. Everyone’s rushing to throw AI at their operations. But research keeps showing that the vast majority of AI projects fail not because the technology doesn’t work, but because the underlying processes are a mess. A broken workflow automated by AI just breaks faster and at higher volume. That’s why Gemba walks matter more now than ever - you need to understand and fix the real process before you automate anything.

At Tallyfy, we’ve built workflow software specifically for this kind of work. You can model your processes, test changes before rolling them out, and then track whether the improvements actually stick. You’re not guessing. You’re seeing real data about how work flows through each step.

Know where the problems are

You can analyze your process flows using workflow software. For example, Tallyfy can help you capture entire processes, run them, and spot the delays at a glance.

Dashboard showing current, pending, and overdue portions of processes. Shipping indicates a problem area in this example.

Where are the delays? How does each task flow into the next? Having this visibility before your Gemba walk helps you know where to focus. Having it after helps you verify that your changes actually worked.

Model solutions before committing

You don’t have to dive into implementation and hope for the best. Use workflow software to model ideas for process improvement before going live. How will your changes impact other steps? Do they address the problems you identified? What about adjacent processes?

A model isn’t reality, obviously. But it’ll tell you whether there are serious gaps in your plan before you bet on it.

Test in real conditions

Once you’re happy with the model, run it for real. The period when an organization switches process flows is delicate. Staff need to understand the new flow and their role in it. Managers need to stay alert to questions, problems, and obstacles.

Tallyfy gives you a way to issue clear instructions, remind people of updated standards, and create a channel for reporting problems or delays. It’s the difference between hoping everyone reads the memo and knowing that each step is being followed.

Gemba walks and software together

Gemba walks give you insights that no software can replicate on its own. If a workstation’s layout is inefficient, no dashboard will tell you that. If people are working around a broken process because they’ve adapted to it, data alone won’t reveal the workaround.

But software gives you what Gemba walks can’t - continuous visibility across every process, every day, without being physically present. Together, the Gemba walk and tools like Tallyfy cover both sides: the human observations that only eyes on the ground can provide, and the ongoing tracking that keeps improvements from quietly reverting back to old habits.

It’s probably the most powerful combination in process improvement. And it doesn’t require a massive budget or a consulting army. Just go to where the work happens, watch, listen, and then use the right tools to act on what you’ve learned.