Virtual obeya: A new collaborative web application for running lean management workshops

Obeya rooms were introduced during the early Nineties by Toyota executives, as a visual approach to break down organizational barriers that prevented effective collaboration in Lean Management meetings. While indisputably effective in achieving their aim, they lacked the option to directly interact with the underlying (electronic) sources of information, because operations were mainly to be carried out manually, i.e. making use of A3 sheets. Moreover, communication was limited in time and space, being confined to what happened in a single project room. In this paper, we propose a mash-up web application, which we have called the Virtual Obeya, whose purpose is to overcome the aforementioned limits. The application, when used in proper context, enables asynchronous sharing of information in distributed teams; being seamlessly connected with cloud and local repositories, it also allows collaboration in real time through data and document manipulation. A subset of smaller, integrated apps has been identified and developed to replace former A3 sheets and to provide, among other examples, semantic search and operations monitoring capabilities. The tool is now in an early prototype development stage and it will soon be tested in pilot environments.