Learn from the 'Gemba' - Kaizen guru

Mr. Masaaki Imai is to the quality - management movement of today what Frederick Winslow Taylor was to the scientific management movement of the early twenties of the last Century. Author of the best-seller, Kaizen - The key to Japan's Competitive Success (1986), Mr. Imai, the founder of the Kaizen Institute of Japan, which has a world-wide network of consutancy missions, was in Chennai last week to launch a crusade for quality and productivity enhancement in the Kaizen way. He spoke to Business Editor, S. Swaminathan, on various implications and managerial ramifications of Gemba Kaizen, or `How to do Kaizen' - the subject of his 1997 masterpiece.

Excerpts.

QUESTION: Between the time your first book on Kaizen was published and 1997 when ``Gemba Kaizen'' came out, there has been a profound transformation in industrial outlook in Japan and elsewhere. Would you say that your recent book captures the spirit of this transformation? And how?

ANSWER: My book Kaizen - The Key to Japan's Competitive Success'' (1986) dealt with the major components of Kaizen such as total quality control, total productive maintenance, just-in-time (JIT) management, quality circles and suggestion systems.

Kaizen means `continuing improvement'. Its application is as wide as life itself. It can relate to personal life, home life, social life and working life.

My more recent book Gemba Kaizen explains the `how to do it' of Kaizen or more precisely the implementation. Gemba is a Japanese word meaning `real place' now adapted in management terminology to mean `workplace'. In manufacturing, it refers to the shop floor.

Q: In terms of the rapid growth of the services in many national economies and at the global level, how would Gemba be identified outside manufacturing enterprises

A: The Japanese use the word Gemba in everyday speech to mean `the real place'. In business whether in manufacturing or in the services sector, Gemba is where value addition takes place. In the service sectors, Gemba is where the customers come into contact with the services offered. In a hotel, for instance, the Gemba is in the lobby, the reception, the restaurants, the guest room and so on. In a bank, the Gemba is where the tellers are working as also the place where officers are in contact with customers and borrowers. In the service companies and in manufacturing enterprises, people who are involved in inter- departmental activity are also in the Gemba.

Q: There are obviously meeting points between the western management concepts and Kaizen. Would you explain how Gemba Kaizen represents a different approach?

A: We must first resolve some misconceptions about Kaizen. It is sometimes loosely defined as incremental improvement or equated with the suggestion system which puts the focus on the individual. Kaizen is continuous improvement and not necessarily confined to marginal changes. It can involve drastic improvements as well in processes and methods. Secondly, it is much more than a suggestion scheme.

In fact, a successful Kaizen strategy would involve major systems such as Total Quality Control / Total Quality Management, (TQC/TQM), Just-in-time Production System, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), Policy Deployment (Strategy devised by top management), the Suggestions System and Small-group activities (the quality circles).

Unlike Western management philosophy which invests top management with a lot of presumptive wisdom based on theoretical knowledge, Kaizen believes that all practical and valuable knowledge is gained from the Gemba or the workplace. Therefore managers and supervisors must focus on the Gemba - on what happens in the normal course and what is out of the normal or as a variation from the expected outcome. Rather than treat communication as a flow from the higher to the lower layer of the organisation, Kaizen emphasises the two-way communication between the supervisor and the shop-floor.

Q: There is a lot of fashionable management jargon in the West about empowerment. More often than not, managers in the West regard delegation as the key to empowerment of their subordinates. How does Kaizen approach this need?

A: The notion of employee empowerment through delegation which is such a typical feature of western management misses out on the synergy between strategy and operational efficiency. In many cases, delegation operates as a ritual or worse, as a process of abdication of responsibility by the manager. Kaizen looks at empowerment as a total process, as a team culture and not a formal or structured participative process of management as it is understood in the West. In the Japanese or Kaizen way, empowerment involves teams and data together leading to the process of improvement of quality and productivity.

Q: In your writings on Kaizen, you seem to lay a lot of emphasis on ``the learning organisation''. What is your view of that which makes for a learning enterprise?

A: The foundation for Gemba Kaizen is the building of a learning enterprise involving both the management and the workforce. It is an organisation where improvement is a way of life and where people take pride in their work, continually upgrade their skills and are empowered to solve problems in Gemba, which becomes the citadel of learning. A learning organisation is inconsistent with the concept of too many layers of managerial authority.

Q: In your use of the term ``learning organisation'', is the pervasive reliance of top managements on Management Information System (MIS) a crucial need?

A: On the contrary. The financial people who are always obsessed with the bottomline are the natural enemies of Kaizen. They do not know the actualities of the Gemba. They often feed the top management with fabricated data. All true learning comes from the Gemba. Top managements who shy away from the shop-floor will not know the facts of the enterprise. Their horizons are bound to be obstructed by data of financial outcome which may not reveal what we call `Muda' in Kaizen. This word in Japanese means ``waste''. In the Gemba, two kinds of activities - value-adding and non- value adding - take place. Muda refers to non-value adding activities the elimination of which contributes to improvements in quality, cost and delivery (QCD) which are the vital goals of management.

Q: In your exposition of Gemba Kaizen, you seem to be setting store by ``pull production'' as contrasted with ``push production''. How do you explain the distinction?

A: Ninety per cent of manufacturing companies the world over, are addicted to batch production, that is, producing as many units as they can, to be sent to the warehouse first and eventually to the final assembly line. This is the traditional push system of production - an eighteenth century paradigm drawn straight from agriculture! It is a system which creates Muda of transport and inventory.

The system of ``pull production'' which is emerging as the response to the dynamics of networked markets and which is based on the pull of the market avoids the build-up of inventory in anticipation of orders. It is largely a flexible system of production with the shortest possible lead time.

Q: How would this impact on employment?

A: The fact is that in the traditional ``push production'' system, overmanning and the presence of unproductive work-force are characteristic features. In the new flexible production system, the risks of redundant workforce would be very much reduced. In any case, Kaizen involves a firm commitment on the part of management against lay-off.

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