Opera 12.3

Yesterday’s session of Opera was taken by Prof. Owen Berkeley-Hill and it was part of the three sessions on Lean Management.

Prof Owen started the session by discussing the definition of Lean and the reasons of the need for change in the companies. He mentioned the cases where past success or market share of the company did not guarantee success in future. The cases included the likes of Jaguar, Audi, Royal Enfield, Binaca and Kwality. Next he discussed the importance of customers, the importance of customer retention over customer acquisition and how in the current scenario, the companies most of the time don’t listen to the customers. He mentioned a quote of Mahatma Gandhi where even he emphasized on companies to be customer-centric.

Next, he started the discussion on the importance of Processes by stating Toyota’s views of getting brilliant response from average people who manage brilliant processes. He gave the example of Toyota and Nissan which rose from anonymity in 1960s to one among the list of top 10 Auto Companies in 1970s. And now Toyota has risen to Number 1 position in the world, solely because of its own organic growth.

Further, he discussed a different perspective on Kano’s Model of Quality and the process of how the implicit Exciting Demand change to explicit Performance needs to implicit “Must Haves” through time. He informed us that Quality is the measure of how well an organisation delivers the customers’ perspective of values which are again related to competition, consumerism and technology. He discussed about how Kaizen reduces the Cost of Poor Quality and Waste.

We generally mention only the seven types of Waste, but Professor stressed on the 8^th waste, which is “under-utilization of people”. When he asked the audience about their under-utilization in their previous jobs, the majority believed the value to be 10%.

The session also included the three variants of waste – Muda(waste), Mura(variation) and Muri(over-burden), the five Lean Principles and the difference between Lean and Command & Control. The former case relates to Learning by Doing, while in the latter to Non-Value Added Time.

Last but not the least, Professor mentioned that there cannot be a sustainable improvement without Kaizen and that there is more to Lean Management than its use in manufacturing; even IT professionals can use it to reduce the cost and wastage of resources.

Throughout the session, the students enthusiastically participated and posed various questions to the professor which he replied in a very clear and crisp manner. The professor also shared some of his work-experiences. This form of out-of-class learning greatly helps in the knowledge enhancement of students which will help us in our summer internship.

Looking forward to his next session of Lean Management where the learning would be through role-play.

Submitted by:

Alka Ranjan

SJMSOM Class of 2012