Satish Hulyalkar

824 Deccan Gymkhana

Pune 411004
Phone: +91 94230 09648
E-mail: satish@satishhlyalkar.com
Web: www.satishhulyalkar.com
Blog: http://satish-hulyalkar.blogspot.com
Newsletter Volume 1, Number 5

Staying in Touch with You

There were some interesting points raised by readers but I will deal with them after a
few months as I plan to look at them carefully before letting you know my findings.

Rethinking on the “Lean Office”

It’s been more than a year and a half that I have been reading and talking about
"lean". My focus area being "office" I have been looking for material on Lean Office, and
World in Pocket or how it is implemented, at Toyota. A Google search on “Lean office” pointed me to
should I say on your thousands of sites but I have yet to come across a full-fledged “lean office”. Here the
laptop? comparison is of course with lean manufacturing.

Quotes for the

What surprised me, while searching at various sites at Toyota, was a video clip from
month Toyota’s head of Sales and Marketing on how they implemented lean in Europe. (Watch
clip http://youtube.com/watch?v=cyjz7lUc4IU ) Toyota fine-tuned Lean practices
A life spent in making
pioneered by Ford for car production. In my last issue, you also read that Toyota is
mistakes is not only
dreaming about a car for the end user. In their quest to reach that target perhaps they
more honourable but
are now looking at applying lean outside plants. It’s not that they have not applied it
more useful than a life
spent doing nothing." but I think that has been done in patches.

During this period, I have also been talking about “lean office” in my training programs
--George Bernard and seminars and had a tough time explaining what exactly a lean office is. I went back
Shaw, to my mental drawing board and started re-defining the lean office. I realized that what
is more important is what any office produces, and how it produces, rather than just
*****
naming it a 'lean office”.

“He uses statistics as At seminars and conferences “lean office” may be a catchy phrase but to put it into
a drunken man uses practice one needs to know exactly what someone should do, how he should do it and
lampposts . . . ultimately what someone should achieve. I finally came to the conclusion that a “lean
office” is one that looks after all those activities that satisfy the customer when he
for support rather acquires a product or service. A product is something produced in plants but service is
than illumination.” something that is purely “produced” in an office. The emphasis has to be on office
productivity.

—Andrew Lang (1844- When it comes to a product, productivity becomes important, as it is a measure of
1912) efficiency. First it was the agriculture era and then it was the industrial era which started
around the beginning of the 20th century. Productivity didn’t matter much during the
*****
agriculture era but was essential in the industrial era especially where markets were
The future depends on open to competition. The rise in the level of productivity witnessed by developed
what we do in the countries (and which took them almost a century to reach) is now achieved by under-
present." developed countries like India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand in a span of just 10
years. The case of China, which was tremendously backward compared to the above-
mentioned countries, and is growing at phenomenal speed has surprised them. What
--Mahatma Gandhi happened in manufacturing did not touch the non manufacturing areas of any
organization.
Tip of the month:
A Shortcut For Using
The Find Command
If you're working with a
large document and
you're looking for many
occurrences of a single
word using the Find
function, having the
Find window open
during your search can
be a nuisance. The
window obscures part
of the text, and it can
be difficult to ascertain
context without all the
words in view. There is
a little trick that makes
using Find much easier
in these situations.
Select Edit, Find and
type the word you're
looking for as you
would normally. After
clicking the button
once, close the Find
window. In the lower-
right corner of your
document window,
notice that the up and
down arrows are now
highlighted blue as
shown below.
Clicking either of these
buttons automatically
searches either up and
down for your
previously entered
word.
This newsletter is for private
circulation and material is
copyright of Satish Hulyalkar.
There are reasons for this. One, the cost implications were minor compared to
manufacturing costs. Second, the processes are not as streamlined as in
manufacturing. Economics defines productivity as the ratio of the quantity and quality
of units produced to the labour per unit of time. How do you measure the productivity
of a sales person and compare it with that of someone who is working in accounts? How
do you measure the productivity of a marketing person or a person engaged in product
development? In the services sector, is a person attending more patients more
productive than a person whose patients have recovered?
This situation changed rapidly in the last quarter of the 20th century. With increased
productivity from blue-collar workers being the new focus, the gap in manpower costs
vis-à-vis costs for white-collar workers widened. No attention was paid by management
to implement similar practices in other than production areas. In the quest to improve
profitability, organizations concentrated on a flat organization rather than implementing
productive norms in non-production sectors of business.
The outcome was a surge of BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) by the end of the 20th
century, the starting point being the Y2K problem. This is done with the sole intention
of cost reduction and a pseudo-increase in profitability rather than sitting down to
analyze the process and weed out waste. This is what was done by Toyota while
manufacturing their cars rather than outsourcing their manufacturing to low wage cost
countries. This strategy led them to be the most profitable car manufacturer in the US
for the last couple of years.
Indian industry has been enjoying unprecedented growth in the last decade and this is
the time when they must keep an eye on non-manufacturing areas and improve
productivity. Here they must remember that productivity is not just the ratio of input
versus output but it is the removal of waste and eliminating NVA (non-value added)
components from the processes.
I have observed that wastages occurring in the office environment are staggering and
they come in all sizes and shapes. Many are not even aware that there are areas where
they never think that there is wastage of resources like money, material, manpower,
machinery and the most critical resource, time. Perhaps I should devote one of my
newsletters in just identifying them.
Do ponder on this and share with others wastages taking place in your office or your
business partners.
Useful Software
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freebie lets you browse and view your images in a Windows-Explorer-like interface.
Try it by downloading it from: http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm
My Contact Details:
Snail Mail: 824 Deccan Gymkhana, Pune 411004/India
 +91 94230 09648
| Satish@SatishHulyalkar.com * http://www.SatishHulyalkar.com