Daily Management: The Toyota Way An entrepreneur has to constantly organize, operate and assume various risks in a business venture
By Faber Aakash Borse •
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Starting a business and becoming an entrepreneur is exciting as well as terrifying. While starting a new business, entrepreneurs face so many challenges; such as instability, stress, negative mindset, overwhelming feelings, lack of support, growing the business, problems of 4Ms (man, method, material, machines), problems relating to marketing, outdated technology, lack of infrastructural facilities, etc.
An entrepreneur has to constantly organize, operate and assume various risks in a business venture. The intensity of the challenge to promote an entrepreneurship culture as well as to evolve new enterprises in a sustainable and competitive manner varies on the daily management. Robust management of routine activities efficiently avoids firefighting and daily surprises for the entrepreneur to focus on growth!
In order to conduct business efficiently, an entrepreneur must overcome these challenges. Toyota has been working on the system based on lean principles that can be a solution to these routine challenges faced by entrepreneurs.
Daily Management is the system that provides the ability to manage departments, functions, and processes, wherein processes are defined, standardized, controlled, and improved by the process owners. It focuses on process and not people. It is a very reliable problem solving and sustenance technique.
Goals of Daily Management Methodology:
- Regularly reaching out to each & every person working at various levels so that a structured review mechanism where a formal discussion is facilitated related to details and communication.
- The management should be done on a day-to-day basis; ensuring daily standard jobs and daily standard objectives are accomplished strictly on daily basis.
- Make everyone come at a common platform, take charge and ownership of each and every aspect.
Steps of Daily Management Methodology:
- Prepare and visualize standards for Man, Machine, Material and Methods
- Define Leader Standard Work
- Have visual controls for standards and results
- Focus on process stabilization
- Record abnormalities for rolling out Structured Problem Solving
- Have a daily accountability process
Daily Management works based on SDCA cycle: The Standardize – Do – Check – Act (SDCA) cycle is a follow-up cycle for sustenance ensuring that the improvements that have been achieved via Plan – Do – Check – Act (PDCA) cycle, do not slide back. SDCA and PDCA cycle are part of Deming's improvement formulae where, PDCA leads to improvement and SDCA prevents the deterioration, respectively. Hence, it is extremely important that both the SDCA & PDCA cycles are well established.
Benefits of Daily Management:
- Provides data on where you are (actual) compared to where you want to go (planned)
- Assists with meeting customer demand
- Improves process quality
- Reduces process variation
- Ensures effective problem-solving
- Help standardize the way organizations manage their facilities
- Ensures sustainability for improvement efforts
