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KAIZEN

 

KAIZEN

 

LT COL NOEL ELLIS

24/VI/2024

 

In one of the companies I worked in the civil, we used to believe in maintaining world class standards of manufacturing. In which, we used to follow the five principals of KAIZEN, a Japanese way of doing things, which I shall discuss today.

Let me share those five bullet points of KAIZEN system in brief with you: -

1.      Sort- Remove the unwanted and keep only the wanted.

2.      Set in Order- Arrange things for easy access.

3.      Shine- Keep things neat and tidy, no trash, no dirt at the workplace.

4.      Standardise- Have SOPs for everything.

5.      Sustain- Make ‘5S’ a habit and adhere to them.

That philosophy was ingrained in us while we were in the Army. We kept things clean and neat, spic and span, geru choonaed, spit and polished, organised and sorted, basically keeping things in order. But over the years, I found that things were not that sorted. I am not sure of the present situation.

Let me give an example. Open a CO’s or his Staff Officer’s computer. This man/woman would have presentations from the age when computers were introduced in the unit, when the floppy discs were of a size of a LP record.

Not only the operational briefings but all and sundry including SOPs, Ladies club, welfare, funds, arboriculture, VIP visits and you name it. OP1, OP semifinal 2, OP almost final, OP half final, Op final, OP revised final, Op final for Cdr and there would umpteen such files. Only the clerk would know how to recover a particular file. Kya pata kab kaam aa jaye ya senior kya pooch le!

Those days floppies had limited memory, thank God mankind developed CDs then DVDs and now external HDs to store data. All are kept under “Lock and Key”.

Which formation commander may ask for what information of which year? Probably when he was posted there as a Lt. This also became the topic of ice breaking, that sir, when you were a youngster, our deployment was like this and now over the years chronologically is like this…….

I have my fingers crossed, if things are the same. I am only conjecturing. If not than thank God for it.

Let us turn to real life. If your house is in order, everything is in order. If there is no clutter, things appear sorted out. Many of you may agree. Some people do not like things sorted also.

The best way to judge any office workers work place if he/she is sorted or not is simple. If there are forty sticky notes on every board or on his computer, he/she is not organised. If there are pending files/mails to be cleared, it speaks for itself. If you open the drawer, if you find it well organised, free from junk, means he/she is a sorted person or otherwise.

If your table is clear of clutter, no piled-up files it speaks for itself. Mind you, in the corporate I have seen real wastage of paper, though they were after everyone’s blood to save paper.

Ask an accounts branch guy, he would have a 300-page document attached to half a page claim of twenty rupees and make minimum three copies for posterity sake. Then scan it and send it to his HO, where the same would be downloaded and printed to be kept in safe custody for the period as specified in the financial regulations and his personal safety. I can vouch for it.

You go to a senior officer’s office and look on his table. He works on a laptop but is surrounded by files, papers, books and periodicals, technical documents, blue prints, rough sheets, one sided paper. A visitor might get impressed on how much work he does in a day. The truth is far from it.

Be that as it may. What triggered my thoughts on this article was a little bit of cleaning to be done in the garden. The bird’s water bowl had gone dirty. Algae had formed and needed to be attended to.

I pulled out a swab of ‘Scotch Brite’ from the kitchen to scrub the insides of the bowl. It needed hard cleaning. A little extra force had to be applied. A green gooey muck got accumulated in the bottom of the pot. A heave to throw the murky water turned into a catastrophic.

The place where I was holding the bowl was all that was left in my hand and the rest of it got flung into the neighbours garden. The bowl split into two. That was the end of the bowl which gave good service for almost three years.

The intention was KAIZEN. Too much of cleaning has its own issues. Do you guys follow it? I wonder!!!!!

 

JAI HIND

© ® NOEL ELLIS

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