Yogesh Jain

These are not two schools actually – one needs to understand in different perspective. Needs, wants and expectations is the key – One need to research on needs even if those are latent. A product from Ford school of thought won’t succeed if it does not fulfill a customer’s need. Innovation can be understood on improving current product, but there are several types / levels of innovation i.e. Product Innovation, Process Innovation, Technology Innovation and Business Innovation besides the lowest rung i.e. cost innovation. If one is able to work on Business Innovation – s/he might touch Ford idea of new product / service. For example Tatkal scheme by Railways is one such innovation which fulfills a latent need of travelers who cannot predict their travel till few days / a day ago. They are ready to pay higher. They used to go to touts and agents. They were anyway paying higher. Now Railways understood the need, kept aside say 30% of seats for Tatkal and whoa additional revenue, latent customer need, unscrupulous touts agents all are taken care of. In above example customer did not come out with Tatkal model but need was very much expressed. Business owner needs to research, work deep in understanding psyche, work with customers, sometimes go into their shoes, talk to them to find out the pain point and work on the product. The product which may fulfill future need may not be worth acceptance and we say – its idea has not come as yet.

Sir, Six sigma has lot of application in aviation- baggage handling, flight management, NVA loss saving, takt time improvement, etc. Yogesh

Hi Shijoy, For this you need to draw up a detailed process flow chart. Once that is done, that identify VA and NVA activities, then we work on Value Stream out of that and improvise what further can be done. VSM as a tool is a detailed one basic of which comes from detailed process flow only. Then find out what are metrics of various processes - say - turnaround time, Average response time Average idle time Average up time etc. etc. These would come from business objectives, customer requirements, internal identification of wastes, QC monitoring data analysis, etc. Draw these things up and then we interact. Yogesh Jain