Kaizen Suggestions at Nokia Factory in India Improve Quality

By Jon Miller Published on October 24th, 2006

There is an article in the Hindu Business Line on October 23, 2006 titled Smart Ideas at Work. The 3,500 workers at the Nokia factory in Chennai, India gave 1,800 kaizen ideas as part of their suggestion system.
Many kaizen ideas seem to have a quality theme to them. There is an example of a pokayoke device in a board assembly machine, and also a simple yet ingenious wheel that identifies the correct language version keypad with the phone’s software.
Jukka Lehtela, Director of India Operations says: “Kaizen is all about incremental improvement. So the changes might seem small but make a world of difference in the long run.”
The global market for mobile phones and similar devices is approaching one billion units per year. Nokia has about a third of the global market for mobile phones. That’s more than 300 million opportunities not to make a mistake and deliver a defect-free product. The improvement ideas like the 1,800 kaizen ideas that the workers at the Nokia factory in Chennai, India identified will make a world of difference.

Jon Miller

Jon has dedicated his 25+ year career to the field of kaizen, continuous improvement, and lean management. Jon spent the first eighteen years of his life in Japan, then graduated from McGill University with a bachelor’s in linguistics.

Yao
September 17, 2010 - 12:39 am
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It is great to know that Nokia factory in Chennai is putting in such great efforts to improve quality of their products. How succesful has this suggestion system been? With regards to reducing the defects by what percentage?