Gandhian Engineering

Several decades ago began the focus on The Quality Model, following the famous Industrial Revolution of the 19th century.?The Quality Model is a strategy for commercial success that rests on the idea that businesses succeed to the degree that they satisfy their customers’ real requirements and continuously improve in achieving this result. Methods and approaches such as Statistical Process Control [SPC] and Statistical Quality Control [SQC]; Quality Planning, Implementation, and Improvement; Total Quality Management [TQM], were rooted in the Quality Model. All such approaches share a core set of principles that, when applied, achieve Quality’s goal and lead a company to high performance. These principles are the foundations of the Quality Model. The principles are:

·????????Customer requirements exist in relation to each task the customer uses your business’s offering to accomplish. The greater the success your offering enables your customers to achieve with respect to these tasks, the more satisfied they become and the more likely they are to engage in future commerce with you.

·????????Real requirements are features of your offering that must be present for the customer to succeed. The more detailed and complete your understanding of the customers’ real requirements is, the more likely your offering will enable their success.

·????????People developing better ways to accomplish the business’s purpose is the driving force behind its success. The more teamed, aligned, and capable a business’s workforce is in thinking through better ways to understand and satisfy customer requirements, the more powerful the business becomes in delivering value. Also, the company is more likely to sustain its success across the challenges the future presents.

The measure of success is the customer’s satisfaction with your business’s product and service offerings and your demonstration of continuous improvement in understanding and productively satisfying each customer’s real needs. ?One of the principles of the Quality Model explained above led to the formulation of the CIP or Continuous Improvement Plan which also finds a place in various ISO certifications till date.

The core idea remains to maximize customer value while minimizing waste. Thus was born LEAN. Simply, lean means creating more value for customers with fewer resources.

A lean organization understands customer value and focuses its key processes to continuously increase it. The ultimate goal is to provide perfect value to the customer through a perfect value creation process that has zero waste.

Eliminating waste along entire value streams, instead of at isolated points, creates processes that need less human effort, less space, less capital, and less time to make products and services at far less costs and with much fewer defects, compared with traditional business systems. Companies are able to respond to changing customer desires with high variety, high quality, low cost, and with very fast throughput times. Also, information management becomes much simpler and more accurate.

A popular misconception is that lean is suited only for manufacturing. Not true. Lean applies in every business and every process. It is not a tactic or a cost reduction program, but a way of thinking and acting for an entire organization.

The term "lean" was coined to describe Toyota's business during the late 1980s by a research team headed by Jim Womack, Ph.D., at MIT's International Motor Vehicle Program.

Six Sigma is a business management strategy originally developed by Motorola, USA in 1986. it is widely used in many sectors of industry.

Six Sigma seeks to improve the quality of process outputs by identifying and removing the causes of defects (errors) and minimizing variability in manufacturing and business processes. It uses a set of quality management methods, including statistical methods, and creates a special infrastructure of people within the organization ("Black Belts", "Green Belts", etc.) who are experts in these methods.

The term Six Sigma originated from terminology associated with manufacturing, specifically terms associated with statistical modelling of manufacturing processes. The maturity of a manufacturing process can be described by a sigma rating indicating its yield, or the percentage of defect-free products it creates. A six sigma process is one in which 99.99966% of the products manufactured are statistically expected to be free of defects (3.4 defects per million). Motorola set a goal of "six sigma" for all of its manufacturing operations, and this goal became a byword for the management and engineering practices used to achieve it. The Dabbawallas of Mumbai have a Six Sigma certification in a service industry and have been observed to render services with 99.9997% accuracy.?I doubt if there are any highly qualified individuals amidst the dabbawallas :)

Kaizen, Japanese for "improvement", or "change for the better" refers to philosophy or practices that focus upon continuous improvement of processes in manufacturing, engineering, game development, and business management. When used in the business sense and applied to the workplace, kaizen refers to activities that continually improve all functions, and involves all employees from the CEO to the assembly line workers. It also applies to processes, such as purchasing and logistics, that cross organizational boundaries into the supply chain. By improving standardized activities and processes, kaizen aims to eliminate waste.

Frugal Engineering or GANDHIAN ENGINEERING is the science of breaking up complex engineering processes/products into basic components and then rebuilding the product in the most economical manner possible. Frugal engineering results in simpler and easier to handle processes and cheaper products with necessary features. Indians and South Asians are known for frugal engineering (Source: Various internet articles).

It also results in a much cheaper final product which does the same job qualitatively and quantitatively as a more expensive complexly engineered product. A cell phone that makes phone calls and does little else launched in India for a price below US$20; a portable refrigerator the size of a small cooler; a car that sells for about US$2,200. These are some of the results of "frugal engineering", a powerful and ultimately essential approach to developing products and services in emerging markets.

Frugal engineering is not simply low-cost engineering. It is not a scheme to boost profit margins by squeezing the marrow out of suppliers' bones. It is not simply the latest take on the decades-long focus on cost cutting. Instead, frugal engineering is an overarching philosophy that enables a true "clean sheet" approach to product development. Cost discipline is an intrinsic part of the process, but rather than simply cutting existing costs, frugal engineering seeks to avoid needless costs in the first place.

The term 'frugal engineering' was first used by Carlos Ghosn, the joint chief of Renault and Nissan. He has praised Indian engineers, saying: "Frugal engineering is achieving more with fewer resources”

At last we arrive at Gandhian engineering.

Gandhian engineering is a concept introduced by Tata Motors intended to convey deep frugality and a willingness to challenge conventional wisdom applied to engineering, technological innovation, and new product development. The name originated from India, and was named following the Tata Motors' Nano car conception, a cheap, frugal, low cost and innovative Indian car. It is associated with the sentence "Getting more [services] from less [resources] for more [people]".

Now for the teasers -

1.??????How different are the modern theories and terminologies from the Quality Model of the 20th century??

2.??????What are the five main “ideas” we can gather from the above theories and terminologies?

3.??????Jargon and big words aside, how would you summarize all of the above into 200 words or less?

4.??????How do you think we as an organization can apply the above in our circle of control / influence?

5.??????What is the most impressive part of this article?