CAPITAL: The Voice of Business Issue 1, 2015 | Page 28

GEMBA
oldest plants, workers now manually form
metal into crankshafts, instead of leaving
it to machines. People doing the work,
instead of machines blindly repeating
actions, has led to insights and innovations
that have already resulted in a 10% cut in
material waste in crankshaft production
at the plant, and the production line has
been shortened by 96%.
The report quotes Takahiro Fujimoto,
a professor at the University of Tokyo’s
Manufacturing Management Research
Centre, who explained why taking this
counterintuitive “step back” has yielded
improvements for Toyota.
“Fully automated machines don’t evolve
on their own,” he said. “Mechanisation
itself doesn’t harm, but sticking to a specific
mechanisation may lead to omission of
kaizen and improvement.”
In other words, as Ballé explained to the
gemba tour group in Pietermaritzburg,
Lean thinking dictates that whatever
direction your company takes, people
must absolutely be at the centre of it.
Ballé’s message is ultimately one of hope,
and it is why most of those who went to the
gemba in Pietermaritzburg have latched
on to his ideas and are already seeing
ways to implement them. The philosophy
he champions is one that presents
opportunities for any kind of business to
constantly improve what it does. Just as
long as we also realise the importance of
the sentence that he has spent his whole
career studying, and that “we make people
before we make parts.”

28

| Issue 1 | Capital

How does Pietermari

AFTER the day of going to the gemba at
Somta and Pfisterer, I spoke briefly to
Ballé and asked him to give me his take on
Pietermaritzburg business. His comments
were encouraging.
“South Africa is going the right way,” he
said.
“You are really not doing badly.”
“You try to solve your problems here.
Where I come from they don’t even try to
do that,” he jokes. “But for some reason
your top executives still have a weird idea