Friday, January 21, 2011

Chaotic Tendencies

Seiri, Seiton, Seiso, Seiketsu, Shitsuke...

If you don't know Japanese, you probably have no clue what I am talking about. (Given that I know of no Japanese followers of my blog, the probability of your not having a clue is rather high!!!) So let me back up a bit!

To make sense of what I am talking about, you need to know what 5S is. To put in a nutshell, the principles of 5S dictate that you should put everything where it belongs! Big deal, you say! Everyone knows this, that is what our mothers (and for some, wives) have been telling us all our lives! Well, it is a big deal in the manufacturing industry - if everything is not in its proper place, well, you don't find things when you need them. And in some cases you find things when you do not need them! Sounds contradictory? Well, to give an example, suppose you are in the factory floor, looking up at a huge crane carrying a beam of iron (the kind that you see in a Tom & Jerry sequence) about twenty feet above you. This would hardly be the time when you would want to find the hammer that someone kept on top of the iron beam! Get the picture? So not keeping the hammer on the beam but keeping it neatly in the toolbox is 5S!

Although our company, specifically the sites in India, does not qualify in the manufacturing industry, but the management took a decision some time back that we want to follow 5S here - it helps everyone. So there was a request - right from the top - for the TIIMMC to make a movie to make employees aware of 5S. When I told some folks that we had to make a movie on 5S, some people sniggered ("You want to make movies? Well, make 5S movies!") while others wondered how anyone could make a movie on 5S, that people would actually watch!

Well, to make the long story short, we took up the challenge & made the movie. The movie has 5 parts. Chapters 1 to 4 were shown to folks in the company from Monday to Thursday in a certain week - and then on Friday, we showed the whole thing including the first four chapters, a documentary section explaining 5S, and finally an epilogue to the chapters. The movie contained a lot of footage from within the company especially in the documentary section, which we couldn't post outside.

So we came up with a version where the documentary section is removed, all company logos are blurred out, and identifiable names changed. With all these modifications, the movie was finally approved for posting on YouTube. So here it is. Let me know what you think.