“Can you cut the swirl in my hair shorter so that it’s mistake-proof and I don’t have to use extra hairspray?” I asked my barber at the end of my hipster-cut last night. She obliged and took it down another 1/4″ by the looks of it. Still had to use hairspray this morning though, oh well.

She poka-yoke‘d (pokey-yokey) my hair at my request, making it easier to style by making it harder to make mistakes in the morning. Making sure that any solution is fail-safe is a fundamental part of Lean Six Sigma, after all your team’s hard work, you don’t want it be undone because of lack of documentation, a lack of training, or a lack of a simple solution. Something like this shadow board…

Shadow Tool Board

…makes it really easy to know what tools are being used. But not only that, what tools are being used most frequently? The ones that are always missing from the board. When those tools are missing, something has happened that requires tooling, that requires an operator to step away from his/her task (even if it’s only a slight turn to the left).

In Lean Six Sigma, boards are one of the best tools. White boards, tool boards, shadow boards, frustration boards, control chart boards, and on and on. I’m sure one day I’ll run out of room to stick boards everywhere, but before then, I have a new board that’s proving to be rather hard to research, a “Pain Board”.

A Pain or Frustration Board is, from what I understand, a simple white board that is located at a piece of equipment to track what issues the person running that piece of equipment experiences.  Ideally, that same person then puts in a work request to maintenance if the machine needs to be worked on, but starting off simple is another of those lean six sigma principles I often overlook. Why choose the hardest solution when the simplest solution will generate savings while we wait for the harder solution to mature? Quick wins in the battle again machine downtime are a necessity in every manufacturing environment, you either improve or get left behind.

My source of frustration is the lack of documentation on the topic.

I joked yesterday on social media that if you google “machine pain boards”…

Google “Machine Pain Boards”

…well, you get a result for painful workout equipment.  Thankfully, a lean six sigma friend of mine reminded me that they’re also called “frustration boards”. Don’t bother searching the term, the results don’t get much better.

This indicates a greater problem, not that I may be making up random words and claiming that they’re Lean Six Sigma tools, but that there aren’t enough people talking about putting white boards on pieces of equipment or machinery in their work places.

Quick exercise, drop a comment below if you want to share a picture of what you had, but when I was in college not that long ago, I lived in the student dorms. Everyone stuck a tiny white board on their door and we left each other messages, drawings (pre-dickbutt), or whatever we wanted to.  If you had one or wrote on one, what did you think of it or what was your best work of art?

So my goal of this and the following posts will be to generate pageviews and google page rank for the lean six sigma topic of Frustration Boards, Pain Boards, and their uses.