The article talks about a very special innovation process used in Toyota to let employees describe problems they meet at work and solve them.
I think this A3 report is a perfect way to be practical in daily work for employees. According to the examples given in the article, people can write whatever they feel comfortable and even draw pictures on the paper. By doing that, they don't need to write a very detailed and time-consuming report to demonstrate the problem, it's easy to read and easy to be presented by the "author".
Though it takes shorter time than to write a several pages report, it contains everything that should be found in a innovation report. It starts from a problem, and not only gives a solution, also giving a business result to the manager, which is more important to the managerial people since they should take both the loss from problems and the cost to solve them into consideration.
However, it still has some limitation. Since it is simpler and has a limit to two page, "authors" can not explain in detail to the readers about how it would be. With less vision of great picture about the problem, management sometimes may underestimate the effect of the problem.
Also, it in most cases can only be applied in manufacturing companies, where people are doing more craft things and is easier for them to come up with a problem and find a solution. Otherwise, employees can hardly find problems and company cannot make this kind of report into part of its culture, thus leading to less of innovation. Meanwhile, some staff even meet the problem, but were not to report or describe it because they can't measure those problems with numbers or financial problems. They can't describe it with word and can only by showing to the manager. What's more, many problem are found by non-experts, therefore they cannot come up with a solution when they try to report. Sometimes a report needs cooperation between different function of departments, however, A3 report were limited to do so.
Yuyang, your comment about "Employees can hardly find problems and company cannot make this kind of report into part of its culture, thus leading to less of innovation" seems very interesting and creative, but I didn't get the whole idea, could you explain more in detail or in example? Thank you :)
ReplyDeleteI think your last statement is a very important one. For this report to be effective the author needs to collect the cross-functional inputs and reflect it in the report more like a team leader or representative for the project rather than an individual contributor.
ReplyDeleteThanks for being Devil`s advocate and capturing the pros & cons involved in the Tool. I do felt the same - For Manufacturing industries and similar industries can find this tool to be best fit to the needs.
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