The Hindu Business Line : Smart ideas at work

Your capacity to supply must at least match, if not exceed, the demand for your services. This is a rule in manufacturing that is too basic, especially if you are handset manufacturer Nokia, which has mastered the art of just-in-time supplies the world over.

But, it nearly felt unable to handle the response from its own manpower at its new factory near Chennai, when it called for ideas for Kaizen, or continuous improvement.

Jukka Lehtela, director, India operations, Nokia India, says, "We wanted to involve our manpower in the improvement of our processes. So we called for ideas." When he asked the team that would handle the submissions how many they were prepared for, he got the answer: "We can easily handle 500."

When he expressed doubts that only so many, of the 3,500 employees at the factory, would come in, the team became geared to handle 1,000 applications. What they ended up with were 1,800 ideas for improvement!

Lehtela met with eWorld to talk about Nokia's `Smart' manufacturing capabilities. The way Nokia does it is to absorb all the best practices practised across its facilities globally and then apply them globally.

Asked if the Indian manufacturing venture has had to change processes after learning from its European, US or other Asian counterparts within Nokia, Lehtela says, with a smile, " It's only about a year since we started. So, all of our processes have evolved as best practices from other places."

Making a difference

Push him a bit about what Indian thinking has contributed to Nokia's global best practices. "Kaizen is all about incremental improvement. So the changes might seem small but make a world of difference in the long run. An example is marking material, that has come in, with Green, Yellow or Red tags."

This helps people working in the assembly line to identify material that arrived the earliest. So, something that has aged beyond expiry is not used while that is nearing expiry is used quickly.

He also dwelt on examples of kaizen improvements that came as part of the employee competition. The ones that were top-of-mind recall for him were a dial that a team had come up with. It is meant to aid assembly employees to ensure that the apt keypad goes with the respective language software.

A spokesperson for Nokia explains, "We use software that addresses different regions in India and hence uses different languages, across Tamil, Telugu, Bengali and the like. Employees may not know more than one language. This dial helps them ensure that the keypad with, say, Bengali letters in them, goes onto the Phone with Bengali language software."

The dial is opaque except for two slots. One of them shows the digits 1, 2 and 3 with the letters of the alphabet of the language. The other shows the name of the language. So, the employee is able to ensure that the keypad with Bengali alphabet goes onto the phone with Bengali software.

This helps reduce mistakes that prove costly to rectify at a later stage.

Another area where Indian minds have helped reduce wastage is in the packaging of finished phones.

Twenty handsets make up a box that is shipped to the market. Each phone has a code called the IMEI or International Mobile Equipment Identity code while the gift box has the MDI code. While a team in the assembly line sticks the IMEI code onto the phone, the last person in the line is responsible for putting in 20 phones into a box, and sticking the MDI code onto the box.

The spokesperson explained that it is stressful for the person to remember which one would be twentieth. "It is constantly at the back of his mind. He would have to depend on the accuracy of the person before him in the line to tell him that this is the final one."

Now, as the twentieth handset goes to him, the person before him merely turns it around and sticks the MDI code onto it. Even if he takes a stroll to other parts of the factory for other work, on his return, he would identify the twentieth handset when he sees it placed upside down with the MDI tag on it.

Finally, Nokia takes eWorld around a tour of the factory. It is fascinating to watch a mere motherboard turn into the most intelligent component of a mobile phone. Even though much of the process is automated, there is some human intervention involved, intermittently, throughout the process.

It is possible that the motherboard, with increasing numbers of components fed into it, is turned around through human error.

"If the board is not placed accurately as it goes into the component of the assembly line, it is possible that the machine working on it could get damaged as much as the phone itself."

To ensure that phones don't enter machines that feed intelligence into them any which way, an Indian mind again came up with something creative: As the phone enters a machine, a small piece of material juts onto the conveyor belt, just above the phone going along the belt. The height of the material is just about the height of the component that is meant to pass underneath. If the phone is turned around, a taller component would wrongly come into position then. The jutting piece of material would come into contact with the taller component fixed onto the phone and prevent it from passing through.

We wonder which would be awarded the best suggestion for continuous improvement at Nokia, Chennai.

bharatk@thehindu.co.in

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