Skip to main content

Productivity improvement in Milco (Pvt) Ltd using Kaizen concept

Kaizen concept is a “continuous improvement” process which is attending with all participants of the company with the process and that support to the Toyota Production System (TPS) as a philosophy (Imai 2012). Furthermore, that concept is based on a series of questions and initiatives that encourage the identification, analysis and solution of problems, called the Scientific Thinking Mechanism (STM) (Shingo 2010) and it can be used for any type of company.

Milco (Pvt) Ltd has achieved significant productivity and quality improvement using kaizen concept (Sunday Observer 18 March 2018,p.18 ). This institution was established in 1956 under the purview of the Ministry of Agriculture and now it has four milk factory located at Colombo, Ambewela, Digana and Polonnaruwa.  This industry has been steadily gaining with the national goal of milk self-sufficiency by 2020.   Over the year 2015, raw milk collection was increased from 61.4 million litres to 64.5 million litres while increasing sales by 5%. But 16 million rupees were losses due to price fluctuation of the raw milk, less productivity, quality losses and high production cost (Annual report 2016).  

During 2016 time periods, the director board of the company was taken the decision to use kaizen concepts to enhance the quality, productivity while reducing the production cost. After conducting the brainstorming session among each segment, they implement a quality circle with the rewarding system on a monthly basis.  Within one month time period, quality circle involve with the packing section was suggested to install blowing systems to sort-out the lower weight milk packets and it will reduce the labour cost as well as the product quality and due to that implementation it was reduced by 2 million (Sunday Observer 18 March 2018,p.18). However, it was very difficult to implement a quality circle within the company due to the negative concept of the employees. Because many of employees recognized quality circle as an extra burden for their duties and its uses by management to cut off the employee strength and other allowances. Therefore kaizen concept is not practical for every company (Vivan, Ortiz & Paliari 2016)

Reference

Imai, M. (2012). Gemba Kaizen: a commonsense approach to a continuous improvement strategy                     (2. ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Shingo, S. (2010). Kaizen e a arte do pensamento criativo: o mecanismo do pensamento científico.                 Porto Alegre: Bookman.

Vivan ,AL,Ortiz, FAH & Paliari, JC 2016, ‘ Model for Kaizen project development for the                             construction industry’ , ResearchGate. Available from: 
<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303915350_Model_for_Kaizen_project_development_for_the_construction_industry>.[ 25 April 2019].


Comments

  1. Kaizen is mostly suitable for skilled workers and partly applicable to knowledge workers.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Good article Nazeer. What you have stated here is true. Kaizens method is not suitable for every company. Milco is a company established under the ministry of agriculture. When it comes to the companies which have government involvement; the employees do not express their ideas without any fear. The employees are such an integral part of Kaizen, the company should foster an environment where the employees are free to give their ideas without fear. So based on these facts, it has more possibility to fail the Kaizens method in such companies.

    ReplyDelete
  5. The overall goal of Kaizan is to make small changes over a period of time to create improvements within a company. It simply says that small change in now can have a huge impact in future. Therefore if company can implement at least some elements in kaizan philosophy such as quality control, just in time delivery and elimination of waste, then in by 2020 they can easily support government to achieve their national goal of milk-self sufficiency

    ReplyDelete
  6. Please refer how to include a newspaper article in the reference list.

    ReplyDelete
  7. A new knowledge on a known sector

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Recruitment process and its impact for the Armed Forces

Recruitment forms a core part of the central activities underlying Human Resource Management  ( Bratton & Gold, 2001) . Mainly there are two types of recruitment such as internal source of recruitment and external source of recruitment. Recruitment is affected by several factors such socioeconomic factors, demographic factors, personal factors and organizational factors  ( Bratton & Gold,2001; Boudreau &   Rynes,1985) .The current recruiting process in armed forces involves with numerous methods under the external sources of recruitment to contact and ultimately contract, potential recruits that include; local and international advertising, informational visits to schools and social groups, traveling military exhibits, direct mail advertising, telephone solicitation, web sites, and contacts and visitations  ( Bachman et al , 2000). However,military recruitment is one of the most challenging human resources staffing operations in the modern world...

Reasons for failure induction process in the plantation sector in Sri Lanka

The induction can be defined as the process that turning to the new employee as part of the organization by providing an opportunity to gain all the new information, knowledge and skills they require to perform their new tasks and that process can depend according to the professional field (Sprogoe and Elkjaer, 2010). However, high levels of employee turnover, constant recruitment as well as loss of team spirit, efficiency and innovation can be occurred based on the induction process (Geldenhuys et al. 2014; Shantz, Alfes and Truss, 2012). Plantation industries have been recruited Assistant Managers based on the English language, family, and secondary education qualification. After recruiting, employees have been gained knowledge, ability, and skills through six months in the house training period. Furthermore, human resource management courses, agriculture diploma, and business management courses are also included as part of the induction process (Sivaratnam,2013). According...

Human Resource Function and ongoing labour shortage of Sri Lankan construction industry

Human Resources are fundamental to all industries, including the construction industry. However, the workforce in the construction industry is extremely diverse with, skilled and unskilled workers, craftsman, managerial and administrative workers. Therefore the use of correct human resource functions in recruitment, remuneration, conditions of employment, performance management, training and development is essential for the long term survival of the construction industries (Spooner and Kaine, 2010). Generally, the performance of the construction industry is often considered as an indicator of economic development. The construction industry in Sri Lanka contributes about 9% to the GDP with around 600,000 employees. During 2018, the total annual construction turnover was about Rs. 800 billion. As per data in appendix A, the construction costs for middle-class housing clearly indicates that the unit cost of construction in Sri Lanka is the highest in the region, second only to Singa...