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A Japanese practice of engaging employees across levels and incorporating their suggestions in improving work framework within the company has led to savings of Rs 354 crore for Maruti Suzuki India, country's largest car maker.
The company, during financial year 2012-13 received over 3.96 lakh suggestions from its employees resulting in the savings.
In the year 2011-12, company’s employees had over 320,000 suggestions to offer which lead to cost savings of over 294.2 crore.
"The guiding principle here is every employee, irrespective of his level, has the best knowledge of his work area. He is encouraged to look around his work area and come up with improvements that will enhance productivity, bring simplicity, save cost, energy, raw material etc. Interestingly, each year the cost saving arising out of these suggestions have gone up,” said SY Siddiqui , COO, Administration ( HR,IT& Finance), Maruti Suzuki India.
The suggestion scheme, which was adopted from the parent company Suzuki Motor Corporation since inception in early 1980s, has seen employees being rewarded every month for their suggestions in both cash and kind.
Most suggestions relate to improving quality and reduce costs, ways to speed up operations, improve efficiencies and streamline supplies. Some suggestions even helped improve efficiencies of the robots that are used on the shop floor.
“For instance, fool proofing at line operations is very critical for our organization. We felt the need to introduce fool proofing at one of the locations and thus developed a small machine in house for the same. Total cost of development is around Rs 50,000. Had we bought the machine from outside, it would have cost us Rs 850,000 resulting in savings of Rs 800,000,” explains Siddiqui.
The company says, as a good practice, this scheme is being practiced at many of Maruti Suzuki's vendors also.
While employees across levels, plants, facilities and business functions participate in the suggestion scheme, an on-line version--Sujhav Sangrehika--- has also been made available with the portal giving real time update on an employee’s suggestions.
“To strengthen idea generation across business functions we are also organizing specific training on Kaizen or continuous improvement. Through these workshops, we are requesting individuals to constantly challenge the status quo in their disciplines. These trainings are helping them develop this ability and mindset,” Siddiqui adds.
These ideas, once implemented a location are replicated across other work areas or locations to reach out the benefits on a larger, company wide scale.
For example a body loading system installed in vehicle assembly increased the capacity by 80 vehicles per day at a cost of just Rs 15 lakh. This automation was done within a period of 3 months. In contrast, an additional capacity to make additional 80 vehicles would have cost several crores,” says Siddiqui.
Implementation of this scheme says the company, has led to better ergonomics in the shop floor reducing fatigue of the workers along with various other benefits.
| Year | No of suggestions | cost saving (in Crores) |
| 2009-10 | 128,861 | 202.10 |
| 2010-11 | 185,645 | 147.08 |
| 2011-12 | 320,000 | 294.2 |
| 2012-13 | 396,000 | 354 |
