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What does digital daily management mean for Lean Managers?

Structure, transparency, and continuous improvement are the foundation of every successful Lean organization. Everything is interconnected, and when daily management truly works, clear focus, increased accountability, and a shared drive forward emerge throughout the entire organization.

In the role of a Lean Manager, daily life is closely tied to daily management. It’s about clarifying goals, visualizing performance against KPIs, capturing deviations in time, and translating them into concrete improvement actions. This often takes the form of new ways of working, updated standards, and adjusted processes. All of this aims to create stability in the workflow and drive the organization forward, step by step.

But reality often brings challenges. Traditional whiteboards quickly fill up with handwritten numbers, sticky notes, and annotations that are hard to read and even harder to track over time. Much of meeting time is spent collecting, updating, and explaining numbers instead of analyzing root causes and deciding on actions. The information becomes static, outdated, and dependent on specific individuals.

Common challenges in this approach include:

  • Time-consuming administration: Manual collection and updating of data before each pulse meeting.
  • Poor data quality: Numbers are recorded incorrectly, updated too late, or lack a clear source.
  • Difficulty seeing trends over time: History is rarely stored in a structured way, making analysis harder.
  • Unclear ownership: Actions are noted but not always systematically followed up.
  • Limited scalability: When multiple teams or sites need to work the same way, standardization becomes difficult.

As a result, daily management risks becoming more administrative than value-creating. Instead of focusing on learning and improvement, the organization gets stuck in manual handling and lacks overall visibility.

Boards on Fire whiteboard and digital board image

Digital Daily Management in Practice

To make daily management simpler, more transparent, and data-driven, digital tools such as Boards on Fire now help organizations track goals, visualize KPIs, and drive improvements in real time. Here are some concrete examples of how Boards on Fire facilitates the work:

  1. Real-time follow-up enabling fast action
    One of Boards on Fire’s greatest strengths is that KPIs, deviations, and results are updated in real time. Instead of spending valuable time gathering and compiling numbers before meetings, the focus can shift to analysis, prioritization, and concrete actions. Pulse meetings become more effective and value-creating, problems are immediately visible, root cause analyses start faster, and decisions can be followed up systematically.

  2. Standardized management across teams and sites
    For a Lean Manager responsible for multiple departments or factories, consistency is crucial. Boards on Fire provides a standardized structure for daily management with the same KPIs, meeting formats, and follow-up logic across the organization. This creates clarity, facilitates comparisons, and strengthens learning between teams.

  3. Full transparency and clear accountability
    Visual management is at the heart of Lean. When goals, results, and actions are visible to everyone, both engagement and accountability increase. With Boards on Fire, this transparency is digital and accessible anywhere on the shop floor or remotely. It strengthens employee ownership and makes improvement work more inclusive.

  4. Efficient management of ideas and improvements
    Capturing improvement suggestions is one thing; actually implementing them is another. Boards on Fire links actions directly to deviations and KPIs, assigns responsible parties, and tracks progress systematically. This ensures that improvement work becomes continuous and integrated into daily routines, rather than ad hoc efforts that are quickly forgotten.

  5. Data-driven decisions without compromising Lean principles
    Digitalization can seem complicated, but Boards on Fire makes it simple. Data is visualized clearly, providing quick insight into patterns and priorities. Decisions can be based on facts while the team remains engaged, and daily dialogue continues just as Lean has always advocated.

Boards on Fire in Practice: Customer Cases with Lean Managers

Our customers’ Lean Managers report that Boards on Fire makes a real difference in daily management, from planning to continuous improvements.

Hoval

The Hoval Group is a global leader in heating and indoor climate solutions. After implementing Boards on Fire at its Jönköping factory and seeing clear positive effects, the factory in Liechtenstein also took an important step toward digitalization. Soon, Hoval will roll out Boards on Fire across the entire organization to simplify collaboration between factories in Europe. All departments can follow the same processes and access real-time data, strengthening coordination and decision-making across borders.

One reason Hoval chose Boards on Fire is the tool’s flexibility and ability to consolidate all processes in one place. This streamlines communication both domestically and internationally, while data visualization increases transparency and strengthens employee engagement through KPI discussions and comparisons.

Read more about the expected impact Hoval anticipates from rolling out Boards on Fire across the entire organization.

Photo of Daniel Manero, Global Lean Manager at Hoval

Swecon

Boards on Fire has become an integral part of the Lean work at Swecon, a Volvo dealer. Daily management, project planning, 5S, deviations, and improvement initiatives are all handled directly in the system, exactly where the information is needed. The result is a more structured, efficient, and transparent way of working for both Lean Managers and employees.

"Boards on Fire makes it much clearer for us to follow up on our work each week. The notes function, which we call ‘Other Information,’ has gone from being static to becoming a tool for continuous follow-up. It makes it easy to identify areas for improvement and share best practices across the organization."

– Peter Norgren, Lean Manager at Swecon.

Learn more about how Swecon transitioned from analog to digital daily management across the organization. 

Summary

From a Lean perspective, Boards on Fire is more than just a digital tool—it is a support system that reinforces the principles of visual management, standardization, and continuous improvement. It frees up time from administrative tasks, provides better decision-making data, and strengthens daily management, which in turn leads to greater control, higher engagement, and a faster pace of improvement—without compromising the core of Lean.

https://www.datocms-assets.com/56488/1744200650-boardsonfire-ellen-citron.jpg

Ellen Citron

Marketing Coordinator

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