Dubai;
I do not know if there is an application in your work for this, but the following story may at least amuse you and was a case study in visual controls for an office procedure.
When I worked for a Design Responsible firm, we had a Supplier Request for Engineering Action (SREA). These often needed to be a priority because our suppliers did not get paid until we got paid from our customer. That did not happen until all drawings were current and correct. Changes in our organization would frequently get buried beneath a mountain of other incoming paperwork on the desks of our engineers, program managers, and others who needed to approve them.
We sped up the process by putting the change request, marked drawings, supporting documents like capability studies, and sample product in bright yellow boxes with Part Number, Date issued, and Owner clearly identified on the outside of the box. This made auditing how many were in process very easy.
However, one plaintive Product Engineering Manager (PEM) caught me in the hall one day and remarked that the visual system seemed to work (and folks did NOT like a bunch of yellow boxes in their offices) and had sped up SREA processing by 87%, but he found it depressing when a new delivery showed up in his area because he KNEW it was just another additional job he and his group had to allocate time for and he wondered if there was room for improvement.
Thinking upon that, our Supplier Quality folks decided that they would put interesting 'treats' (small toys, home-made goodies, etc.) in random SREA boxes that could be shared within the work group. A week later, the grinning PEM related how he still didn't like the yellow boxes showing up, but it was a LOT more fun!
P.S. The metric used for this was start of SREA Date to fully approved completion. Before the 'Yellow Box' experiment average time was 60 working days. After the experiment it had been reduced to an average of 7 working days.
