Genchi Genbutsu (現地現物?)

Genchi Genbutsu (現地現物?) means “go and see” and it is a key principle of the Toyota Production System. It suggests that in order to truly understand a situation one needs to go to gemba (現場) or, the ‘real place’ — where work is done.

Why is this so important?. I run a team of developers in a financial technology startup, if they were not in a position to be able to observe and see for themselves how the software we create is being used we would not be able to validate our assumptions about how the business is doing its job. The ability to “go and see” is so important and so fundamental to the agile/lean process that I recently took the step of getting my guys out onto the desks to observe operations in process. What we observed was somebody struggling to upload a set of bank statements for a customer, this process took 20 mins or more to achieve as we simply had assumed that they only ever did one page, and only did this occasionally. Seeing for ourselves that they did a lot more pages than this meant we changed our approach and the developer thought to himself “Hey I can fix that easy…” and said “Did you know we can do a simple change to the application which means you can do as many pages as you like at the same time?”… and “Do you know we could do this with drag and drop?”…. and … “Did you know that because we are lean and agile we can do this for you in live production by tomorrow morning?”… We made a member of staff happy because we made it easier for him to do his job and this meant that: -

We saved (conservatively) 20mins a day from 5 mins of observation and 2 hours of work.. this is a saving of (20*5*4) i.e. 400 minutes per month, 4,800 minutes per year or approx 160 hours a year. This translates into a conservative saving of £2,083 a year and given that the employee is also spending that time on more revenue generating items for the business the benefit is at least double this for a cost of £100 of developer time. The return on investment of the “Genchi Gembutsu” approach is huge and this is the sort of thing we are delivering to our business every single day. So agile teams and evangelists take note — it’s not enough to be agile one must also go to gemba and see where the work is done if you want to realise the benefits of your agile process. So allow your teams to observe and suggest away as the value to your business is truly immense

Regards

Julian

Head of IT
Capital On Tap