Shadow Boards
At Peak VM, our Shadow Boards are designed to bring structure, safety, and efficiency to your workspace. Following the key Lean 5S principle of ‘Set in Order’, each board assigns a clearly defined space for every tool or piece of equipment, ensuring everything has its place and can be located within seconds.
By instantly highlighting missing or misplaced items, our tool shadow boards help eliminate wasted time searching drawers or worktops and promote consistent, efficient workplace organisation and working practices across your teams.
- Reduce time spent searching for tools.
- Follow key Lean 5S principles (Set in Order).
- Reduce Single-Minute Exchange of Die (SMED) machine part changeover times.
- Increase the lifespan of tools and equipment.
- Make efficient working a daily habit.
How a Shadow Board Could Improve Your Business
Tooling Shadow Boards
Our Tool Shadow Boards are proven to save valuable time by making it easy to identify missing items from a distance: a core principle of Lean visual management.
Available as wall-mounted or mobile Tool Shadow Boards, they ensure that the right tool is always in the right place at the right time. Whether you’re managing workshop hand tools, precision instruments, or maintenance equipment, our solutions improve workflow and workplace organisation.
We also supply EV Tool Shadow Boards, designed specifically for electric vehicle maintenance and repair environments. We’re proud to have delivered a range of these specialist boards to Stagecoach, supporting their investment in electric bus maintenance and operational excellence.
Lifting Tackle Shadow Boards
Compliance and safety go hand in hand: under the Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998 (LOLER), proper storage, marking, and inspection of lifting equipment is essential.
Our Lifting Tackle Shadow Boards help ensure compliance by keeping lifting accessories visible, secure, and organised, so teams can quickly locate the right tool, inspect it, and return it to its designated position after use.
Shadow Board Cabinets
Commonly supplied alongside 5S Shadow Boards, our clear-panel Shadow Board Cabinets are fully assembled, custom-built, and designed to provide visual security for valuable tools and assets.
They’re particularly useful in environments where temporary staff or contractors operate, ensuring accountability and quick visual checks of tool locations. For harsh or industrial settings, these cabinets offer added protection for electronic or calibrated tools, helping extend their lifespan and reliability.
By integrating visual storage solutions, teams naturally adopt better equipment care and accountability habits.
Want to know more?
Discuss with our team how we can help design a workplace organisation system that helps your team stay efficient, safe, and audit-ready.
Calibrated Tool Shadow Boards
Calibrated tools and precision measuring instruments require careful and consistent storage to maintain accuracy.
Our Calibrated Tool Shadow Boards provide a safe, designated space for each item, preventing damage and ensuring tools are always stored correctly. Boards can be fitted with secure fixings or mounted on angled A-frames to further reduce the risk of items falling or being misplaced.
This approach helps protect delicate equipment while supporting audit readiness and compliance with quality standards.
Change Over / Spare Parts Shadow Boards
Keep essential changeover and spare parts visually stored close to the process to reduce downtime and support faster SMED (Single-Minute Exchange of Die) changeovers.
Our Changeover Shadow Boards are designed to streamline production efficiency by ensuring parts are organised, easy to access, and ready for immediate use; helping teams perform quick, accurate changeovers that minimise disruption.
Transform your workspace into a hub of efficiency, where downtime is rare and every second counts.
Frequently Asked Questions
Peak Visual Management has over 10 years in advising, developing designs, manufacture and supply of Shadow Boards. We can supply Shadow Boards to visually store hand tooling, specialist tooling, machine parts and more.
We thought it might be useful to share some answers to the many questions we get asked about our Shadow Boards.
What is the process for designing a Shadow Board?
– Send the tools to PeakVM – If you have tools that you can be without or are buying in new tools – you can send them directly to us or we can arrange to collect.
This gives the us the benefit of being able to check the fit of each tool on the shadow board before we despatch. We are also happy to buy in tools if you would like us to supply the tools to go with your Board.
– Send us the photo information we need. This works well if you have a relatively small and simple selection of hand tools that you wish to store on your Shadow Board.
We will send you in the post a printed grid board and instructions for how to correctly photograph the tools for accurate Board design.
– Invite PeakVM to site. Invite a PeakVM representative to your facility and we will audit the tooling to ensure we have everything we need to accurately design your Board.
Depending on your location and the time required onsite we might have to charge a little extra for this option
What materials do you use for your Shadow Boards?
We use a combination of materials for our Shadow Boards, and we choose the best material option suited to the application.
Most of our Boards are based on applying a laminated vinyl print to an Aluminium Composite Material (ACM) base. ACM is long lasting and durable whilst easy to work with, providing reassurance if your maintenance teams are to fix the Shadow Board to existing wall space. If there is to be heavier items (such as lifting tackle or large torque wrenches) to be stored on the Board then 3mm aluminium sheet provides and hard wearing and heavy-duty base material. For environments where tooling might be ‘roughly’ handled, we recommend applying a protection to the face of your Shadow Board to eliminate any potential scratches to the face of the board. Polycarbonate provides a cost effective, durable and visually pleasing option.
We use a combination of fixings to store the tools onto the Board. Hardened Steel Dowels with an applied rubber grip ensure maximum grip for your tools. Along with Dowels Spring Clips are ideal for storing hand tools and less heavy equipment, making tool removal simple and low effort. We use a combination of bolts for heavier items to provide extremes of mechanical strength.
What if we want to store very heavy tools or parts on our Shadow Board?
We have supplied Shadow Boards for many applications where very heavy parts or tools are to be stored such as machine changeover parts, lifting tackle or Rail industry tooling. We will specify appropriate fixings which will have the mechanical strength to hold the weight of the part. We often also advise mounting the Shadow Board angled onto an A Frame so that the weight of the parts is pushing into the mechanically strongest part of the fixing at the intersection with the board. The use of an A Frame and the angled fixing it provides also reduces the chance of parts falling off the Board particularly for mobile Shadow Board applications.
I’m struggling for wall space; can you supply the Shadow Board on a freestanding frame?
Yes, we can supply our shadow boards on frames. We use a 40mm aluminium profile which is extremely strong and provides the flexibility to modify or adapt for future uses. We would generally advise that a Shadow Board supplied on a free-standing frame be supplied on base plates that are mounted to the floor (for stability and safety reasons), but it is also possible for our frames to be supplied on castors.
Can you supply mobile Shadow Boards?
Yes, we can supply our shadow board on mobile frames. As many factories and depots have uneven floors so we generally advise that mobile Shadow Boards are supplied on an angled A Frame to reduce the risk of tools falling off the board.
Can you the supply the Shadow Boards in a lockable cabinet?
Yes, and we have supplied many Shadow Boards into lockable cabinets. Some common reasons for using our lockable cabinets is if there are multiple shifts, contractors working onsite or to protect calibrated or sensitive equipment. Our cabinets are constructed from an Aluminium extrusion frame and clear polycarbonate panels. These clear panels allow for full visibility of the tools. We can supply the cabinets with keypad lock so there is an option to change the security password/pin at set intervals.
What is the lead time for a Shadow Board?
The lead time of a shadow board hinges on a few factors:
- Tooling availability – the sooner we can get our hands on the tools/tooling information the sooner we can start designing.
- Complexity – complexity is added to a shadow board by either a larger number of tools or unusual/larger/detailed tools. If a Shadow Board is more complex it will take more time to both design and assemble.
- Quantity and specification – quite simply a larger project with more detailed work will take more time to design and manufacture.
Typically, a “straight forward” Shadow Board project with good tool availability, of low complexity of medium level quantity and specification will take 2-3 weeks from order.
How big can you make a Shadow Board?
The largest ACM sheet size available is 2400 x 1200mm. However, if there is specialist tooling involved or a very high number of tools that will require the layout to exceed this size we can spilt the design over multiple sheets of materials. We have done this on many occasions for specialist applications such as Rail track gauges and pipe storage.
How long will a PeakVM Shadow Board last?
This isn’t an easy one to answer, the longevity of our Shadow Boards is directly affected by several factors.
- Environment – harsh chemicals found in cleaning equipment and lubricants can, over time have a negative affect on the materials we use to manufacture our Shadow Boards.
- Behaviours– if the board is respected and tools are carefully returned then there is less risk of dents and scratches appearing. The fixings used to hold tools in place are also more likely to retain their mechanical integrity when not treated poorly.
- Usage – The number of times tools are being placed onto and removed from the Shadow Board will have an effect on how “fresh” that the board stays.
Difficult environments and heavy usage will have an effect on how well your Shadow Board lasts. However, we have seen well used PeakVM Shadow Boards in testing environments such as rail depots still in use 5-8 years after initial supply.
Will you supply the Shadow Board with our specific branding?
Yes, all our Shadow Boards are designed specific to each client so we are keen to ensure the logos and branding design elements are added to the Shadow Board design.
Proven Impact of Our Shadow Board Solutions
Explore our case studies to see how Peak VM has helped organisations across the UK implement effective, durable, and visually clear shadow board solutions that improve efficiency and support a culture of continuous improvement.
