What does kamishibai mean?

It is the name of a Japanese street theatre that told stories with picture cards; Toyota borrowed it for boards of audit cards. Each card tells the auditor what to look at, and the board tells everyone whether it has been done.

How long should one audit card take?

Two to five minutes. A card is one question or a handful of checks on one station, done on the floor. If a card takes half an hour, split it.

Everyone, by cadence: operators and team leaders take the daily cards, supervisors the weekly ones, managers the monthly ones. That is the layered part of a layered process audit.

What about the audit checklists themselves?

The board tracks that each audit was done; the checklist is what the auditor fills in. In LeanSuite, Audit Management holds the checklists and schedules them, and every finding becomes a tracked action.

Kamishibai or kanban?

Kanban tracks one-off work through stages until it is done. Kamishibai tracks recurring checks on a cadence and resets each period. The cards look alike; the movement is different.

How often do you update the board?

Every shift for the daily cards, and the team leader reads it at every huddle. Reset daily cards each day, weekly cards each Monday and monthly cards on the first; review which cards to keep once a quarter.

Lean Studio board · Daily management

Kamishibai Audit Board

In one sentence

A kamishibai board is a visual audit board holding a T-card per short recurring check, arranged by daily, weekly and monthly cadence, where each card shows red until its audit is done and green after, so overdue checks are visible from across the floor.

A kamishibai board is a rack of T-cards, one per short audit, arranged by how often each is done. A card is red side out until the audit is done and green side out after it, so anyone walking past sees which checks are overdue. The board is a way of sustaining standards with two-minute audits rather than one long one.

See it in action Start a 90-day pilot

Cadence	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri
Daily · 5S spot check	Done	Done	Done	Missed	Due
Daily · safety walk	Done	Done	Done	Done	Due
Weekly · standard work, station 4	Done
Weekly · gauge check			Finding
Monthly · manager 5S audit					Due 28th

When to use it

When to use the Kamishibai Audit Board

To sustain 5S, safety checks, standard work and CILR checks after the event that set them up.
For layered process audits, where operators, supervisors and managers each take cards.
When audits are done from memory and the ones nobody likes get skipped.
To give leaders a visible standard work routine on the floor.

What is on the board

1
Daily cards
Short checks done every shift: a 5S spot check, a safety walk, a startup check.
2
Weekly cards
Deeper checks: standard work on one station, a gauge check.
3
Monthly cards
Audits by a manager or someone from outside the area.
4
Card front and back
The check on one side, the sign-off and any finding on the other.
5
Findings
Stickies for anything a card turned up, with an owner.

Running it

How to run a Kamishibai Audit Board session

1
List the checks worth doing on a cadence: 5S spot checks, safety walks, standard work observations, gauge checks. Each check becomes one card of two to five minutes.
2
Write the card: what to look at, where, and what good looks like on one side; a place for the date, the initials and a finding on the other.
3
Assign cards by layer: operators and team leaders take daily cards, supervisors weekly, managers monthly. Put the names on the board.
4
Do the check at the workplace with the card in hand, and turn it green when done. If something is wrong, write the finding and add a sticky next to the card with an owner.
5
The team leader glances at the board at every huddle: any card still red past its time is raised there and then.
6
Reset the cards at the start of each period. Monthly, count the missed cards and the findings; a card that never finds anything is retired or rewritten.
7
Good output: a board with no card red past its time, a short list of findings with owners, and leaders on the floor at a predictable rhythm.

Worked example · sample data

Worked example

The sample board shows one week across five cards. The daily 5S spot check was done Monday to Wednesday, missed on Thursday and is due again Friday. The daily safety walk was done every day so far. The weekly standard work observation at station 4 was done on Monday. The weekly gauge check was done on Wednesday and turned up a finding, shown in amber, which sits next to the card as a sticky with an owner. The monthly manager's 5S audit is due on the 28th. At Friday's huddle the team leader raised the missed Thursday spot check: the person holding the card had been called to a breakdown, so the card was reassigned to the day's cover as a standing rule, and the gauge finding was checked to confirm it had an owner.

The board shown at the top of this page, read through. Invented data, not a customer.

Common mistakes

Cards that take half an hour. A kamishibai card is a look, not an audit report.
Only supervisors hold cards. The layered part is the point.
Turning the card green from the office.
Findings with no owner. The card shows the check was done; the sticky shows something is being fixed.
Never retiring a card. A check that has been green for a year has done its job.
Not resetting. A board full of green from last month tells you nothing about this week.

How it works in Lean Studio

1
Start from the Kamishibai Audit Board template: three rows of T-card slots for daily, weekly and monthly cadences.
2
Make a card per audit with the check written on it; drag the card to the done slot, or recolour it, when the audit is complete.
3
Add a finding as a sticky next to the card, with an owner, and reset the cards at the start of each period.
4
Save the finished board to My templates so the next team starts from your version.

Lean Studio boards are drawn with stickies, text, shapes (rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, diamond), arrows and charts, and any board can carry the 15 data widgets, from a scorecard to a kanban. See all widgets and boards.

Also in LeanSuite

Where it goes next in LeanSuite

In LeanSuite you build any audit checklist, schedule it, complete it on a phone or tablet and turn every finding into a tracked action.

Each card's checklist is built in Lean Creator and scheduled in Daily Standard Work to a person, a role or a machine with a repeat rule; auditors complete it on a phone or tablet, and missed audits show in red. Audit Management
A finding can raise an issue tag with an owner and a due date for the maintenance or support team. Daily Issue Management
A standard work check that keeps finding the same deviation is a training gap: the skills matrix shows each person's level per operation, and the training that closes the gap is assigned from the gap view. Competency Management

See Audit Management

Open this board in LeanSuite

Kamishibai Audit Board is one of the 30 ready-made boards in Lean Studio, LeanSuite's whiteboard. Try the interactive demo in your browser with sample data, or pilot LeanSuite on your own lines for 90 days, with the setup done by our team.

See it in action Start a 90-day pilot

What Lean Studio is

Related boards and templates

In the lean glossary

FAQ