Japanese word “Gemba” or “Gembutsu” means “the real place”.

The concept of “Gemba Walk” was first used in production environments in order to observe the work in is actual environment. 

Observing human resources, facilities, equipment, business process and the actual flow of goods between stations and process activities enables leaders to see the work in “the real place”.

This concept is applicable not only to “physical production processes” but also “service” processes. Listening in a customer service call together with observing on screen applications used by the agent is a similar way of observing the work in real place. We can call this a “Virtual Gemba Walk”. 

A Gemba Walk is one of the finest occasions to capture improvement ideas, complaints, and issues in the work. 

It also demonstrates management commitment toward professional development, boosts morale and has impact on adopting a continuous change culture.

As more and more work gets digitalized, work performed by physical and software robots are increasing in the portfolio of work. Knowledge workers perform most of the work “online” interacting with and switching between numerous software applications.

Process and task mining is a beneficial instrument to complete a “virtual gemba walk” in these type of work environments.

If you have logs (data records) of a business process recorded by your software application and those logs are connectable by means of a case ID, then you can analyze millions of cases visually in the context of the end to end process, just like a visual gemba walk. 

Then you can dive in to specific patterns, such as cases with longer cycle time, more feedback loops etc. This is one of the major use cases of process mining which is “process discovery”. The analysis output generates process diagrams automatically so that you can compare it to the “documented” or “so told” version. Other use cases include “real time compliance checking” “SLA monitoring” “scheduling of work” “generation of solution design documentation for automation” etc.

Task mining is a more granular analysis complementing the end-to-end process mining.

It is used to discover each individual task of a business process by using digital recordings captured at the desktops of employees performing those tasks. 

Task mining tools generate work instructions from these recording automatically. It allows to analyze different ways of doing the same task by different employees, task cycle times, bottlenecks etc. Improvement and automation opportunities are analyzed and again you can compare the “actual work” to the “documented” or “so told” version.

Physical and Virtual “Gemba Walks” should be a key recurring activity in every leader’s agenda.