Sunday, March 20, 2005

Keep it simple !!!

Got this in a mail today One of the most memorable case studies on Japanese management was the case of the empty soap box, which happened in one of Japan's biggest cosmetics companies. The company received a complaint that a consumer had bought a soap box that was empty. Immediately the authorities isolated the problem to the assembly line, which transported all the packaged boxes of soap to the delivery department. For some reason, one soap box went through the assembly line empty. Management asked its engineers to solve the problem. Post-haste, the engineers worked hard to devise an X-ray machine with high-resolution monitors manned by two people to watch all the soap boxes that passed through the line to make sure they were not empty. No doubt, they worked hard and they worked fast but they spent whoopee amount to do so. But when a rank-and-file employee in a small company was posed with the same problem, did not get into complications of X-rays, etc but instead came out with another solution. He bought a strong industrial electric fan and pointed it at the assembly line. He switched the fan on, and as each soap box passed the fan, it simply blew the empty boxes out of the line. Moral of the story: KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) i.e.always look for simple solutions. Devise the simplest possible solution that solves the problem :-) So, learn to focus on solutions not on problems "If you look at what you do not have in life, you don't have anything" "If you look at what you have in life, you have everything"

5 comments:

  1. who sends you all these mails?

    they didnt really do it so simply as they could have...all they had to do was to put a patke designed mars robot to check each soap box ....japanese are not really so smart

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  2. that was really a good one Rocky and jaya from you too..

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  3. Nice one. Jayaram stragely I too thought about patkes' robot while reading the post.

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  4. Nice one. Reminds me of that Joke(pun) of US spending 3 Million Dollars researching a pen ink which will work in space and Russia opting to use a pencil directly.

    Jayaram stragely I too thought about patkes' robot while reading the post.

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  5. Its nice..there's a message in it..

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