At the Lean Six Sigma Conference in Phoenix his year, a few lucky participants were able to do a Gemba Walk with one of the hotel staff in Phoenix. The details of what this activity entailed reminded me of something my home section had done 25 years ago, but didn't call it a Gemba Walk - we called it a “Plant Tour”.

In reality it was not a plant tour but a visit to a resort in our area. During this visit, the head of housekeeping there at the hotel explained their “quality checklist”; what they do to ensure the guest rooms are ready for the next occupant. We then went to one of the hotel rooms and “walked” through the checklist with them. In essence, something very similar to what was labeled as a Gemba Walk at the LSS Conference.

Around that same time, my company's VP of Operations did a safety walk through one of our production facilities. Usually the manager of that facility would make sure the safety aisles were clearly marked, trash was picked up, etc., basically what any of us would do if company was coming to visit our homes. Was this a Gemba Walk? From the various definitions and discussions on the topic, this would seem to qualify.

My point being is that many activities that were performed decades ago just made sense to improve operations but did not have a fancy label. 5S - hello! Spring Cleaning. While typically only done when one's mother told us to clean our room or when she saw Dad's workshop, items were sorted, tossed, reorganized, area cleaned up a bit, etc. until the following spring. What may have been missing is a systematic approach to doing it, but there were often boxes to be donated to Goodwill or items dumped into trash cans afterwards.

I imagine someone will post that there is so much more to a Gemba Walk than this; I will contend that the essential elements are the same as what what my section did 25 years ago. Maybe if I had told my mother when I was 12 that I was going to spend the afternoon performing a systematic sorting, setting in order, shining, and labeling methodology, she would have been so impressed that I could have managed to dodge doing it until the next weekend. ;)