Virginia Mason healthcare facility and Toyota Production system ..

I was giving a reading assignment for my fourth sem MBA Operations students in Lean Operations when I chanced upon an interesting reading material in the Operations management book by William J Stevenson on the Virginia Mason hospital in Seattle, Washington, USA. In 2021 it merged with CHI Franciscan to form Virginia Mason Franciscan Health. It was the first time I was reading of a healthcare facility taking up the Toyota production system that was used to produce cars, to improve the quality of healthcare in the healthcare sector.

Virginia Mason Hospital was founded in 1920 in Seattle, Washington (the place where Boeing planes are assembled in NW US) and continues as one of the prominent private no-profit healthcare facility in that state. Virginia Mason hospital has been recognised all throughout the one hundred and two years of it's existence to be the leader in bringing healthcare innovations in the healthcare sector.

Virginia Mason, ranked at #40 among the best hospitals in US, has been the leader in bringing the concept of team medicine in healthcare, where instead of each physician working independently, they brought the concept of team medicine, where the team of doctors would collaborate and find effective solutions of healthcare problems and issues

• In 1923, they were the first to introduce Insulin in treatment of diabetes, introduce Electro Cardio gram(ECG) 
  
• 1949 - allowing fathers in delivery rooms
• 1956 - VM Research Centre which encouraged everyone to ask questions, so that the next time, these questions are answered and forms the basis for its growth and development. That year also saw midwifery program being introduced in the hospital.
• 1980 saw the first insulin pump being used in the hospital, the first cochlear transplant in the ear being carried out. That year also saw the identification of genetic markers for Rheumatoid arthritis
• 1990 saw a skilled nursing support facility for people with aids opening up. Even though it had the risk of infection and reputational damage, the Bailey Bouchet centre has been one of the corner stones of VM healthcare facility
• 90s also saw the mobile mammography unit starting and the 1000th kidney transplant being done there. 90s also saw the first robot assisted prostatectomy surgery and the corona artery bypass surgery conducted there
  
• 1992 saw the VM production sytem improve the safety and quality of healthcare, while reducing the waste and costs from Toyota.

Organising annual innovation fairs to promote innovation, building things themselves to solve problems, an example is the therapy car which helps patients after knee cap replacement surgery to get onto a vehicle after their hospital stay to go home.

The suggestion scheme of Kaizen, to help make things better for the doctor, hospital and patients daily has benefited VM to offer world class healthcare to the people of Washington state. The spirit of innovation, commitment to quality and safety, an undiluted focus on opatients as the centre of everything theu do has taken Virginia Nason hospital to the heights it has reached now. 

Thanks to the Toyota Production system. 

George..

Blinkit, grocery delvery in the blink of the eye.

Technology has been the big motivator in the new world to add customer value which has seen many startups bloom across the world. One such startup that came up in North India started by two IIT graduates from IIT Delhi and IIT Bombay (my alma mater).

Blinkit (formerly Grofers) started by is a unicorn (valuation of more than a billion dollars) q-commerce (quick commerce) company that partners with local stores to ensure quick delivery of grocery items, veggies, fruits and cold storage items to your home in less than ten minutes. 

 

Even though Blinkit does not have own warehouses nor logistics services, but manages to provide you delivery within 10 minutes of placing an order at their website. Presently they serve select areas in select cities of the country.

How they do it with the help of modern technology in the blink of the eye, in less than 10 minutes, is a lesson for the world. Q-commerce is how they call it. They manage it through micro-warehouses (dark stores) spread across the city that stock more than 2000 of the more frequently required grocery items popular in Indian homes and which is put up on their website. This comfortable set is exactly what is needed in most Indian urban homes. They do not believe in well stocked large format warehouses, of the Walmart and DMart type. Though Zepto and Dunzo is already in the q-commerce market, Bigbasket, Swiggy are contemplating early moves lest they lose this market.

Is the billion dollar company waiting to be acquired by Amazon or Walmart ? How can it improve Walmart or Amazon's standing and market cap ?

Click here to understand more about the company and how it manages its operations. Click here for another doc explaining the logistics.

Anyway you look at it, the huge investments running into millions of dollars, is benefitting the customer, the common man in a great way. (recently Swiggy brought $700 million into their q commerce startup) 

 

The author stays in Electronic city phase 1 in Bangalore. It takes approximately 10 minutes for him to place the order each time by scrolling through the list and toselect the items based on availability, cost and quality. (twice every week). Another 2 minutes to make the payment. His experience over the past two months has been just exemplary. Within maximum 12 minutes he finds Blinkit delivers the order at his home. 

 

The quality of the items delivered by Blinkit is excellent, no pilferage, no error in the list and packing quantity (as different from my experiences with Amazon and Jiomart). The very courteous delivery boys make doubly sure to ascertain whether the ordert has been completely delivered. Most of the times Blinkit orders are delivered in closed/sealed paper bags, helping the environment and avoiding tendency of the delivery staff to pilfer.

The author is amazed as to how an Indian innovation in the organised retail industry, the Q commerce model, can bring more growth and innovation in this sector in the coming years across the world. It is also interesting to see how the likes of Amazon and Walmart will adapt or adopt this technological innovation by two IIT graduates that is taking India by storm.

George.

AACSB accreditation - Indian schools ..

 B-schools with AACSB accreditations in India are:

1. ISB Hyderabad
2. IIM Calcutta
3. XLRI Jamshedpur
4. SPJIMR Mumbai
5. IIM Indore
6. School of Business Management at NMIMS Mumbai
7. IMT Ghaziabad
8. TAPMI Manipal
9. IIM Udaipur
10. JAGSoM Bangalore
11. Amrita School of Business (ASB) Coimbatore
12. IIM Lucknow
13. SCMHRD Pune
14. ICFAI (IBS) Hyderabad
15. VIT Business School Vellore
16. Management Development Institute (MDI) Gurgaon
17. Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT)
18. International Management Institute (IMI) New Delhi
19. K J Somaiya Institute of Management Mumbai. (Above list is not in chronological order)

Alliance School of Business Bangalore is already a member of AACSB for the past two years and is looking at accreditation in the coming years.  

Why  accreditation ?

Accreditation pushes institutions to meet and maintain their high standards, in turn increasing trust and confidence in them among the public and boosting accountability. This helps potential students and their families to place a certain level of trust on the institution and course basis the accreditation received. - www.idp.com

Accreditation is a system for declaring that a program or institution meets established quality standards to provide assurance and confidence to the public.

Accreditation enables a member school to develop clearly defined goals and objectives based on its mission and philosophy. Accreditation is both a process and a status. It is the process of reviewing schools and their programs to assess their educational quality – how well they serve students and society.
 

Accreditation is the recognition from an accrediting agency that an institution maintains a certain level of educational standards. the accreditation process empowers higher educational institutions by helping them to analyze their loopholes, improve their academic structure, work on it, and gain trust amongst individuals. It provides institutions an opportunity to design their education and head in the direction of continuous improvement.

The goal of accreditation is to ensure that institutions of higher education meet acceptable levels of quality

Do we care to reduce our water footprint ?

Water footprint is the amount of water we use in our daily lives. The surprising fact about water is that it converts itself from one form to another, Fresh water to brown water in the kitchen, fresh water to sewage in the toilet and so on.

Do we have a water policy in our organisation ? Are we aware of the fact that water is never lost fromn this planet, only thing is it changes form from one to the other.

This HBR article (click here) by Will Sarni in August 2009 did throw some interesting insight into the aspect of water footprint and why we need to worry about it.

Why supplier relationship is more important these days

In these days of turmoil and complexity, both in the global health and microprocessor stress scenarios, supplier relationships are getting strained beyond comprehension. While OEMs are facing variability of customer demand, the suppliers are getting a feel of this variability through stress on lowered cost and volume contracts and competition with a range of suppliers often competing on modern manufacturing processes and fast changing technologies.

It is in this context that the article by Prof. Willy Shih of Harvard Business School in HBR of April '22 "In uncertain times big companies need to take care of their suppliers", (click here) has great importance. He stresses that healthy and agile supplier relationships are the need of the hour.

Toyota, the world's leading manufacturer has realised this truth years back and has over the past eight decades of its existence worked its heart out to cultivate loyal supplier relationships that have stood the test of time. The Keiretsu programme, that binds all their suppliers and looks at improving supplier's involvement in the product assembly or manufacturing, has helped ensure very stable and forward looking supplier policies. 

Though of late, Toyota also had to feel the impact of microprocessor shortages and Covid, its healthy supplier relationships developed over the past decades reflecting on healthy quality and functional supplier relationships has helped it besides improving availability of end products, improved customer satisfaction and overall profitability. It also seen Toyota rise to being the numero-uno in in the global automobile sector, also global manufacturing. As per Fortune global rankings Toyota stands at #9.

For those companies who are hard pressed practicing Toyota's lean manufacturing, Prof. Willy has some cool tips like 

• forging strategic partnerships over transactional relationships, to 
• implementing more price flexibility in contracts to factor in the rapidly changing system parameters and 
• to embrace more of Lean principles and Toyota practices like maintaining Just in Time inventory.

These points are very much valid in these modern times of turmoil and disturbed supplier relationships. In the future we can look forward to the system being disturbed more from such out-of-control events. This all the more stresses on the need for more stronger OEM-supplier relationships and flexible cost contracts as everybody understands it is more costly vacillating between multiple suppliers than developing a limited reliable supplier base for the organisation in the long run.

In other words a reliable supplier base reflects on effective cost management and improved customer satisfaction, leading to overall better profitability.

George.

Kaizen in everyday life - Akshit Kennedia

Very sensible and practical suggestion to start practicing Kaizen in our daily life from this very young boy. Kudos to him ....

Click here ..

Al Khwarizmi and the world of algorithms..

The word algorithm is derived from the name of the 9th-century Persian mathematician Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, whose nisba (identifying him as from Khwarazm) was Latinized as Algoritmi (Arabized Persian الخوارزمی c. 780–850) - Encyclopedia Britannica

The future world of AI is very much dependent on algorithms.. Thanks to the brilliant foresight of the Arab mathematical  genius Al Khwarizmi 1200 years back whose studies at Nalanda, India to interact with our mathematicians, introduced Hindu-Arabic numerals to the European world. 

The mathematical field of Algebra is also named after him. 

https://www.britannica.com/biography/al-Khwarizmi

Former USSR recognised him in 1983 with a postage stamp on his birth anniversary.