There are a few fundamental building blocks in our company’s success and longevity: - we believe in making products that will stand the test of time, we believe in delivering customer service that leads to lifelong, delighted customers, and we believe in investing time and thought in our work processes. These processes encompass quality control, manufacturing, recruiting, product design, equipment purchase, technology, productivity, and so on. And at the heart of our process thinking lies Continuous improvement.

What is Continuous improvement?
Continuous improvement or CI is an approach to management that helps us improves products, services, and processes in an ongoing manner. This approach comes from Kaizen, a Japanese concept that focuses on reducing & eliminating wastefulness, or muda. What's interesting here is that wastefulness is not limited to the physical aspects alone. Wastefulness can also apply to facets such as:

• Excess stock due to overproduction – leads to storage costs, and capital locked up in inventory

• Motion – every time an employee must spend time searching for a tool that is not in its place is considered wastefulness

• Inactive time – waiting for a task to get done leads to loss of productivity

• Poor supply chain management – transporting, for instance, does not add value to a product and it makes sense to minimise transport to avoid wastage of costs and time

• Improper manufacturing – this leads to defects which means that all the materials, cost, time, and money that has gone into making the defective product is a waste too.

Implementing CI and Kaizen at TI
Texmo Industries (TI) has adopted Continuous improvement to improve products, services and processes on a continual basis. We believe that there is always room for improvement. It could just be a 1% change, but we know that it leads to big improvements over time. Continuous Improvement is one of the most important contributors to business sustainability.

The goal at TI is to make incremental changes that add up to significant impact. The results of our commitment to Continuous Improvement are patently obvious – we have been around for almost 70 years, learnt to navigate challenges of various kinds, and have charted a course for the future too. CI is helping us stay the course because it is at the heart of how all of us run our company.

#InterestingInfo

• Kaizen was adopted by business establishments in Japan after World War II.

• Masaaki Imai, the founder of the Kaizen concept has also authored a book called ‘Gemba Kaizen’. Gemba denotes a place where the real actions take place, and he says that a manager’s desk is not gemba!