From Monozukuri to Hitozukuri
Increasing the value of a company, also means to increase the value of people and based on this behavior many organizations are investing a lot in its work force, adopting the Monozukuri and more important the Hitozukuri technique.
Monozukuri
The term Monozukuri comes from Japanese words ‘mono’ and ‘zukuri’, that mean ‘thing’ and ‘production’. It consists on doing things well. Even if the Monozukuri was considering a necessary and sufficient condition for the company success in the past, from several years this condition has revealed itself as a limit to overcome. The excess of specialization, especially in production, has determined a lack of flexibility in the job. This lack cannot be ignored in a strong competitive sector.
Hitozukuri
To solve this problem, it could be adopted the lean technique of Hitozukuri, from Japanese words ‘hito’ and ‘zukuri’, that mean “people” and “production”. It consists on the ability of enrich people. In other words, we understand clearly that monozukuri (product excellence) cannot be achieved without hitozukuri(people excellence).
The soultion could be to adopt the tool of SKILL MAP.
The skill map is a tool of visual management: a table made up of rows, with the name of operators, and columns, with the production lines and main tasks.
Each operator can reach a score from zero to four in every single task. This value represents his job enrichment. In particular, we decided to identify the different levels as follow:
0 — for whom, who hasn’t already had any experience in the task;
1 — for whom, who has taken part of training plan;
2– for whom, who has a full knowledge of the process;
3 — for whom, who can solve no-standard problems;
4 — for whom, who can do a guide to others.
Through the skill map we can easily understand the level of job enlargement by looking at each single row: every empty space along a row represents an area of improvement for the person itself to reach a more integrated knowledge of his job.
As a result, this tool is very useful also for the people in charge of supervision. They are quickly enabled to find the points of strength and the aspect of improvements of every workers, in a contest of long life learning.
By giving the opportunity to the workers to do different jobs, we are giving them the opportunity to better understand the behavior of company and to face new problems with new solutions.
“Many times, the operators themselves apply their multitasking ability to suggest improvements for production process” (Industrial Technician).
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