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                                                    LEAN Work Culture Implementation – Kaizen Approach, The TOYOTA way

The Key to Improve Performance Quality, Productivity And Profitability through People Engagement !!!

 

Context: In today’s scenario of globalization, even World-Class companies are struggling to survive. Not only they are reshaping to overcome their own weaknesses and stretching to leverage their strengths but also challenging their value chains.  Every other workplace naturally needs to change drastically from their conventional management practices in order to become leaner and leaner (i.e. to on-goingly reduce inputs by half, enhance value to customer by double). 

Who else can do this but their empowered employees? This is a big challenge.  Managements are facing difficulties in changing mindsets of people to take the above challenges head-on. 

 

TOYOTA has shown the way long ago! Get all your associates Kaizen Conscious to build strength inherently in your organization. Only they can delight customer/s in the value chain, if they so wish. Kaizen is a Japanese word literally meaning, “Change for the Better”. It stands for and implies Continual Improvements in all walks of life. Kaizen strategy in TOYOTA, which helps it's employees not only in challenging previous growth targets and LEAN achievements but also exceeding them. That is also one of the prime reasons why Toyota and it's management approach holds high regards in most part of the world.

 

Resulting continual improvement attitude (the Kaizen-Culture) helps diagnose root cause/s of inefficient working in organisations. It offers a systematic approach to changing attitudes (mindset) and behavior of people from one of fire-fighting crises management to that of prevention orientation thereby leading to miraculous organisational change reflected in terms of techno-commercial business results

It not only helps in continuing to improve performance of existing business lines through incremental innovations on products, processes, and costs but also tackles 

disruptive changes through breakthrough improvements. In short, it makes employees proactive who in-turn help establish and achieve newer benchmarks of business performance measures in key result areas (KRA), both tangible and intangible. 

                                                                       

The legendary Mr. Peter Drucker has strongly advocated Kaizen Culture in his article ‘The New Society of Organisations’ in Harvard Business Review. The success of post war economic miracle in Japan is normally attributed to techniques such as JIT, TQM, Kanban, Five-S, etc. But none of these can be accorded credit in absence of the single most important common factor the ‘Kaizen’ system. 

Gaby Mendoza in February’92 World Executive Digest wrote on the “Secret of Toyota’s success” where he refers to Kaizen as the “Driver” and “Which must be installed first”. 

With the help of derivative philosophies (Pearls) such as JIT, TQM, Kanban, 5-S, TPM, Pokayoke, SMED, Quality Circles, QFD, Taguchi Techniques, 6-SIGMA & even procedure oriented systems such as ISO 9000, ISO 14000, QS 9000; Kaizen then smoothly drives the organisation on its journey to be a LEANER company. In fact, Kaizen-thread binds these pearls to form a Kaizen-Necklace (the concept from Book “World Of Kaizen: A Total Quality Culture For Survival” by Shyam Talawadekar).

Objectives of Lean Education: Companies wishing to be on Lean Journey often fail to implement it because they tend to copy-paste it, then struggle and give-in rather than appreciate the principles underlying any such new system and then adopt/adapt it.

Our unique approach will help understanding the Concept, the Principles; its' interlink with implementation of series of management techniques (the Kaizen Pearls) mentioned above, and most importantly it's softer (behavioral) aspects along-with pitfalls in implementation. 

One can learn how positive attitude can be 'manufactured' by looking at wasteful practices in any workplace, continuously correcting them, converting impossible into “Simply Possible"!

 

For Whom: Being LEANER organisation should be a prime goal for any manufacturing or service organisation. Application oriented education should begin with their Top Management (Cross-functional team who has authority to influence company-wide changes) in particular.  Anyone else (from any functional area) who wants to function as a change agent for organisational transformation may follow the suit but the top must learn-n-lead the process. 

Typical1 Achievements & Improvements in KRAs or KPIs for some of our CUSTOMER

through our direct involvement in integrated LEAN3 implementation (See 10-Step Lean-Process)

The results2 (KRAs or KPIs) as follows are easily convertible into Tangible-Monitory-Terms (ROI, ROCE, Payback period, etc. as AOP tragets) 

For Which Company/Business?

When?

What did we do?

Helped in implementing Kaizen, 

5S-TPM, LEAN, 

Visual Factory Management

Helped in implementing Kaizen 

5-S 

TPM

Visual Factory Management

Helped in implementing Kaizen-5-S to facilitate 

LEAN (BPS: Bausch Production System) &

Visual Factory Management

Helped in implementing 5-S, 

Visual Factory Management

7-step PDCA cycles, TPM (including Model Machines), 

Kanban, SMED, Streamlined JIT-flow

Helped in implementing 5-S, 

Visual Factory Management

Quality circles, TPM, Kanban, SMED, 

Streamlined JIT-flow,

LEAN-Kaizen in general

Kaizen improvements at Supplier (Onyx)

Visual Factory Management

Helped in implementing Lean-Kaizen 

Training for Senior Management, Officers, Workers

Visual Factory Management

Improvement projects  (7-step PDCA cycles) training

Participated in Designing & Implementing State-of-Art LEAN Greenfield project : Addressing objectives viz. 1/ First Choice of Customers in Target Markets 2/ Create Performance Culture. With a goal of “0"-Accidents, “0"-Defects, "25%“-Waste reduction YoY, "25“-Kaizens per employee per year. By focussing on Lean-Value-Streams,Visual-Management, 5-S, TPM, JIT-SCM, etc. Special notes: Lean-JIT canteen, Ampi-theatre, Natural air-cooling, etc.

Here are the Samples of Results2 we achieved

1) Overall productivity improved e.g. One type of alternator output improved by 200 %. 2) The lean effort helped accommodate the increased output in the same square feet space.   3) Employee Involvement - Improved to Near 60%On-going.

Some interim improvements in the process of targeting 100 % reduction in Electricity power restoration time are as follows. 1) SCADA control panel operations made Error free. 2) Cycle time reduced from 2-minutes To ½ minute. 3) Search time for tools reduced from 5-minutes to 1-minute. 4) Employee Involvement - Near 90% in some locations

1) En-route LEAN Production System, some ppm Improvement/s achieved are e.g. Gun Drill Breakage in DSLA –100% Improvement, Nozzle damage – 100% Improvement 2)Employee Involvement - Improved to Near 30%. Balance internally scaled-up.

1) Productivity up 33% in Gear pumps 2) Inventory reduced- 200 % in Gear pumps 3) Some Set-ups crashed (from 300) to 1 minute 4) OEE Improved (From 43 to 83% on Model Machines) 5) Engine Test bed - Flexible to take 3 models(that previously used to test only 1 model), - Productivity up 100% 6) Won CII award for above achievements

1) Productivity increase 56% in center section 2) Set up time reduced - 78% on bottleneck m/c 3) OEE Improvement (From 39% to 85% on VMC) 4) Capacity Increased by 100 % 5) Reduction in Material movement – 66% 6) Overall Lean score in Gear Pump improved from 1.4 (Apr’03) to 3.1 (Jul’04)

7) Employee Involvement – Improved to Near 90% 8) Before ppm – 5 digit, After – 4 digit (3months)

1) Company-wide Kaizen implementation by us enabled producing culture change evidence at grass root level (for theDeming Award process) 

2) Employee Involvement -Improved to Near 90%

3) Before – 5 digit ppm Defectives

After – 4 digit ppm Defectives

First-pass Results compared to old-plant: 

Transportation steps reduced from 49 to 25

WIP storing stations reduced from 41 to 20

FloorSpace per Unit production reduced from 35 Sq.Mtr to 25 Sq.Mtr

Cleanliness-n-Ambiance 5”S” score improved from 50 to 80+

1

2

(US multinational)

2004-2006

3

Business (Large Scale, 2500+ people) - Electricity generation – Hydro, Thermal, Location – All India (Indian multinational)

Business (Large Scale, 2400+ people) - Fuel injection equipment. At Nasik (German multinational)

2004-2007

2004-2006

4

5

Business (Large Scale, 2500+ people) – Diesel Engines,

Location – Pune (US multinational)

Business (Large Scale, 500+ people) – Hydraulic systems, 

Location - Pune

(US multinational)

2000-2004

2003-2006

6

7

Business (Large Scale, 2500+ people) – Tractor Farm equipment, 

Location – Nagpur

1998-2002

8

Business - Alternators/Generators 

Location- Pune (US multinational)

 (Indian multinational)

2000

2006 

Footnotes: 1) These are just a few sample achievements (highlights) from among various quantum improvements in Quality, Cost, Throughput-time (Order-to-Delivery), Inventory turns, Space required, etc. that our team has facilitated. 

2) Improved Results are given in percentage terms in order to maintain our commitment to confidentiality of our client’s proprietary information.3) Read in brief about our fast-track Kaizen approach to achieve above results and be a LEANER organisation. 4) Names of the Business or Company are not disclosed for obvious reasons.

KRA or KPI: Key-Result-Areas or Key-Performance-Indicators

ROI: Return On Investment. ROCE: Return On Capital Employed. AOP: Annual Operating Plan.

Partial list of Our Current Assignments with astonishing results (as sampled in the table) are 'ON' in following Industry-Businesses: 

1/ Foundry of TOYOTA Kirloskar Motors 

2/ Pig-Iron Plant (An Indian Multi-national)

3/ Petrochemicals (A multi-plant Indian Multi-national)

4/ Infrastructure and Mining (An Indian Company)

5/ Auto Components Manufacturing (An Indian Multi-national) 

6/ Industrial Valves (A British Multi-national)

7/ Food Processing (An Indian Multi-national)

8/ Electrical Equipment Manufacturer (An American Multi-national) 

9/ Chemical Processing Plant (A multi-plant Indian Company) 

10/ Electrical Power Generation, Transmission, Distribution Group (A multi-plant Indian Company) 

SERVICE INDUSTRIES

8/ Consumer Retail Franchisee Chain (An Indian Company). 

9/ A Defense Service Organisation (A State-Government Outfit).

10/ Financial Services (An Indian Service-Provider Outfit).