Supremacist. Mitsui Empire Revelation: Exploring the Ruler of Microeconomics

Author: Bai Yimin / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-08-01
Features: In 1998, the over-100-year-old Japanese company Toshiba, under the impact of the global economic recession and Japan's persistent economic stagnation, experienced a decline in operations, encountering a historically unprecedented "loss-making operation." The company faced significant internal reforms. At that time, Mr. Nishimuro, who served as the president of Toshiba, visited world-renowned multinational companies to study how large companies innovate. After meeting with Jack Welch, the CEO of the famous General Electric Company, he decided to introduce General Electric's advanced management system—Six Sigma, which was still being promoted at the time—to drive the company's reform. Toshiba believed that adopting Six Sigma management could solve some problems, but its scope of application was limited and could not achieve the effect of influencing the entire company's management. The key to applying Six Sigma to the entire company's management was to study issues directly related to operations and, based on this, select project themes and achieve results. Toshiba's experience in implementing Six Sigma was: "After learning Six Sigma, to achieve results, one must take Six Sigma as the foundation, combine it with the company's own situation, and develop it; otherwise, it will not produce results." With this philosophy, Toshiba advanced the MI movement. Toshiba's MI movement was divided into three stages, with 2000–2002 as the stage. The goal of M12001 was to improve management quality to enhance customer satisfaction and reform the business structure. By innovating the company's structure and culture, Toshiba sought to re-establish a competitive advantage to ensure the company could become an excellent one in the 21st century. To this end, Toshiba adopted a top-down approach to promote the MI movement throughout the company. A dedicated MI team was established, reporting directly to the Toshiba president. This team vigorously promoted the MI movement across the company and was responsible for all related work. Toshiba considered speed to be very important, believing that a project should be completed within four months, and in practice, it usually hoped to complete a project in less than three months. After implementing the MI movement, Toshiba achieved significant results: First, it improved the level of customer satisfaction. To start projects with the customer in mind, Toshiba developed and introduced tools capable of accurately identifying real customers and making the customer value chain clearly visible. Second, it reduced quality costs. Quality costs not only included defective products but also indirect labor waste. Third, it achieved consensus based on data. The concept that decisions must be data-driven had been established at Toshiba, and any work could be expressed in clear numerical values, making it easy for everyone to understand the current state and the desired level after the project was completed. Fourth, it enhanced common language across the company. The implementation of Six Sigma improved mutual understanding between different divisions, made it easier for employees to accept the ideas of top leadership, and strengthened the cohesion within the organization. Fifth, it obtained benefits through projects. Since all projects were directly linked to profit indicators, an increase in the number of projects meant an increase in profits. Compared to other companies that implemented Six Sigma, Toshiba's MI movement had its own characteristics. The voice of the customer was taken as the starting point for any of Toshiba's Six Sigma activities, and the criteria for selecting projects were the problems raised by customers. Thus, when problems were solved, customer satisfaction should improve. Toshiba's technical experts emphasized that "starting with the voice of the customer" was the difference between Toshiba's implementation of Six Sigma and Western companies. Toshiba believed that a top-down approach was the best way to achieve business optimization. MI projects were based on DMAIC and implemented through DFACE. DMAIC describes the entire process of solving a problem: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control. These tools were prepared to be used at every stage of problem-solving. DFACE stands for Define, Focus, Analyze, Create, and Evaluate. DFACE is an improvement technique developed by Toshiba, known as Toshiba's version of Six Sigma. This technique has also been widely trained across the company. Its characteristic is that it is more suitable for the design and development of new products and revolutionary changes to existing processes. P34-P35