Teaching Lean with Virtual Reality: Gemba VR

Abstract

Lean production is best taught on the factory floor. Yet, in higher education, it is almost exclusively taught in classrooms. We want to keep and proliferate the learning experience of exploring a real factory’s “Gemba” and, at the same time, to remove limitations to factory visits. Due to recent developments in virtual reality (VR) technologies, VR offers excellent opportunities to achieve this. In this paper, we present an innovative way to teach lean production with VR. We show how we implemented a solution to let students be immersed in the factories of Toyota, ABB, and other world-renowned companies without having to travel. We also report on our experiences and provide other teachers the information needed to adopt “Gemba VR” in their own teaching.