Life coach - Step 64 of 100 - Size of one

This article is for Sherry Bhatti who has promised to critique my writing and provide his valuable insights. Thank you Sherry.

I had quoted an example in my previous entry that I preferred my clerks to type the Part II order for a soldier returning from leave on the day he returned and was standing for company commander interview. I expected someone to comment that it is inefficient for the clerk to type just one Part II order for one soldier. Does not the time tested drill of the clerk sitting one weekend per month and typing Part II orders of every soldier make sense.

Size of one is what I normally preach to everyone. So does it mean that every time Toyota makes one car in Japan they ship it to US instead of having a batch load of cars that fill up a container. So here is my take on it, size of one wherever it is possible. If not size of one, then the next possible smallest increment. So in this case it would be a size of one container.

Where is this useful? Everywhere especially inspections. Let me recall how all inspections went in our unit and other units I know of. We had EME inspection and everyone worked on vehicles focussing only on that, then we had weapons inspection and everything was geared for weapons cleaning, we had document inspection and all registers were worked on, and blah blah blah. And everytime it was fire fighting. Leave everything else and fight this fire. It kind of seemed chaotic in terms of process maturity. Now a wisecrack I would make is that our size of one was the one audit inspection that was on hand. I am my biggest enemy. Let me explain why size of one audit inspection is not size of one.

An inspection should not be a one time annual effort that we have to really focus on. Because what that does is, it hides problems, messes up normal work schedule, does not focus on resource balancing and in long term is highly inefficient and hence costly.

One of the concepts I really loved was surprise tests during my school. We were not supposed to sit and study for an exam when it was round the corner. Exams were there just to provide us feedback. If we did our homework everyday there was no need for studying at the last moment.

I applied this concept to my troops for BPET tests with slight modification. There were no annual BPET tests. A soldier could appear for the BPET on a fixed day every week.

Back to vehicles inspection - if the driver and the mechanic keep the vehicle operational through out the year - why the need for geru chuna. The log book should be complete at any time. The PM1 and PM2 tasks done when scheduled, not just for inspection. It all boils down to size of one. I treat the vehicle as the size of one and focus on it at the time it is needed. I do not wait for a batch job around inspection time.

The size of one will introduce main hardships initially but what it does is, it exposes the hidden problems which otherwise would never surface. Size of one in other words is linked with JIT - just in time. Size of one is perfection which may not be possible due to various reasons - say EOQ - economic order quantity, but everytime we reduce the batch size - as in differential calculus we say as limit tends to infinity or in this case limit tends to zero we discover hidden problems. And these if we take care of will improve our operational efficiency.

I request you to think it over and provide feedback if you have implemented size of one in whatever aspect possible.