“Problems are not stop signs, they are guidelines.”
Robert H. Schuller
NHK Japan recently aired a program that highlighted a Japanese firm helping companies in other countries improve business operations.
Having worked with Japanese companies and alongside individuals in various roles in the States, I was well aware of the challenges and sensitivities in gaining trust in order to win business or effect change within an organization.
Japanese brought their particular ethics and methodologies which did not always mesh with more Western approaches.
This was all presented in the NHK show but I was reminded of something else that the Japanese method was good at: identifying the core problem and understanding it clearly before initiating a plan to solve it.
In one highlight from the program, a company had asked the Japanese consulting group to help them improve the process of preparing defects in parts that came off of a production line.
Frequently, some parts had small superficial blemishes or other defects that failed client specifications and could not be delivered. While there was a process in place for workers to diligently restore the parts to serviceable condition, the company had piles of parts and a mounting backlog of orders.
A solution was needed to make the repair process more efficient.
Or, so the company thought.
The Japanese firm said, essentially, why bother with improving the repair flow for the defective parts and instead look at the production process to see what’s causing the high frequency of defects in the first place?
That is, look upstream to the source of the problem and fix things there and not patch up things way downstream which is a wasteful and inefficient use of resources.
Treat the source, not the symptoms.
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Masking inefficiencies with additional resources.
Hiring a full-time engineer to be Johnny-on-the-spot rather than simply upgrading older hardware & updating software.
Staffing remote offices with IT support and purchasing expensive equipment over centralizing control of operations.
All examples of attempting to solve a problem downstream rather than working upstream to the source.
Simpler; more elegant; and certainly less expensive.
