Business Kaizen Activities

Recently, there was a presentation of excellent examples of Re-do Zero activities and an award ceremony for the second half of FY2022.

Our Kaizen activities include "Foreman Training (F-ken)" and "QC Circle Activity “ on the factory floor, and "Re-do Zero Activity”, which mainly targets improvements in office work.
The Re-do Zero Activity was initiated in 2016, when our group set its goal to “Improve the Quality of Office Work and Efficiency of Operations in the Indirect Departments”. We were designated as a model company for the introduction of Self-Process Completion by Toyota Motor Corporation.

Presentation of Excellent Case Studies of Activities

Every half year, we hear presentations of excellent case studies. All of the presentations this time were very good as usual.The Gold Award winners were the two cases of "Modification and abolition of operations related to defect tallying work" and "Improvement of efficiency in purchasing operations”.

All of the excellent examples, including the Silver Award winner, are for improvements in office work in production-related divisions. Many of them are in line with "DX-ization," which is being implemented as a group-wide activity, and they deal with digitization of work and systemization of production status management, etc.The improvements were not limited to paperless operations, but also included improvements in time efficiency by preventing errors, and finding reasons for implementing tasks that everyone had taken for granted. These were the result of team effort to improve administrative work in departments that normally tend to give priority to improving production processes.

There are two points in particular that I found very good.
The first is that those who participated in the activities were able to use the new tools and make improvements by collaborating with other departments and affiliates, which allowed them to learn across organizational boundaries.Second, in each case, the presenters themselves realized that even greater improvements could be made in the future, and I sensed a willingness from them to implement these improvements. This year marks the eighth year of this activity, and I felt that we are moving into a new phase.

It was indeed a very meaningful presentation meeting, which lead to the sprouting of this year's slogan, "A team that responds flexibly to change without being bound by past concepts.” After the presentations, we were able to hold a reception with the award winners for the first time in many years. The participants were eager to interact with each other beyond the walls of their organizations and decided to visit each other's workplaces. They were mainly looking to explore what kind of business improvements they could make and what they could incorporate in their own divisions.
Seeing everyone's ambition improve, I was more and more encouraged at the end of the day.