One-Is-Better for JIT

In response to an interview on style-tricks, an actress said: Focus on just one body part and show it off.

Whatever may be the message she expected her readers to carry home, to me it was a reminder to complete this long pending blogpost One-Is-Better!

Today when I read news "set up a biz with just one form" it further got reinforced.

In Five-S technique of Kaizen to improve productivity and performance there is a pillar titled Seiri. One-Is-Better¹ is one of the themes or campaigns driven under it.

1-is-better campaign is a means of streamlining operations. It also facilitates 1-piece flow as required to make a quick or JIT: Just-In-Time delivery. 

Take nail-cutting activity for instance. It involves cutting followed by polishing off burrs on nail. Imagine cutting nails of all the 10 fingers at once followed by polishing all 10 at once. You will be free to attend to any other interruption only at the end of 10 minutes if each nail takes 1 minute each for both cutting and polishing. Instead you could get ready to attend to next interruption at the end of every minute if the cutting of one nail at a time is immediately followed by polishing the same. 

It's like freeing up or 'delighting' 1-customer every-minute instead of processing a batch of 10. The latter forces all the 10 customers to wait until the full batch of 10 gets processed. Such batch practice thereby 'delays' the delivery. The latter forces one to work with more stocks than optimum that the former (that is the JIT) advocates as also makes it possible. Not only the former speed up delivery but also it reduces the cost of poor quality (COPQ) part of the cost of quality (COQ). 

Basically, 1-is-better thought is a way to eliminate redundancy. It strips away the un-needed (be it the activity steps or the material resources for activities). Imagine just a single key or 1-key (as pioneered by Japanese auto makers like Toyota, Honda, etc.) that opens a car-door as well as dickey and the fuel-lock. 

A 2-in-1-paper-weight cum penholder, a 4-in-1-color pen, a multi-function printer, a pen-pencil combo, a One-Point-Lesson (OPL), etc. are few other examples. Such 1-is-better ideas in action facilitate lean work culture and eliminate clutter (the visual noise) as well. Thereby they enable focussing on the task at hand. 

In general, the 1-is-better concept helps one to do more with less resources and less efforts and finish the work faster.

So isn't the Narendra Modi government's single form (administrative process) to incorporate business a most welcome step. In fact more the use of such One-Is-Better! themes better it is.

The 'easing' thereby reduces a lot of Waste as a result of eliminating 3D: Dirty-Danger-Difficult activities. In fact it improves performance also. India ranked 142 among 189 economies by the World Bank in 2015 is expected to improve its position to 50th in two years if such 'Ease of Doing Business' continues.

So let's be innovative to find more and more One-Is-Better! opportunities to improve whatever, whenever and wherever we can.

Footnotes:
1: Examples from the book "Visual Management through Five-S A Japanese Tool Of Kaizen" Author: Shyam Talawadekar

Also read a few relevant blog-posts hereunder: Please do consider sharing this post or sharing your initiatives on above lines in comment box.

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