Project News

1. Introduction

This brief report provides the information on training that took place at SIDO Headquarters, Dar es Salaam. As the one of the fulfilment/ requirement of completing the Master Training course, the participants were required to participate in this 5-day training that began on 10th February to 14th February 2014 prior leaving for Japan to accomplish the course through visiting and learning from the Kaizen guru who have been applying this methodology for quite long time.

The training involved 14 trainers who have gone through all stages of Kaizen and have managed to deliver training and guidance to enterprises for at least two enterprises. The training was conducted by JICA experts in a highly participatory manner.

2. OBJECTIVE OF THE COURSE

The course has the following objectives:

General objective:

The general objective was to orient the trainers on Master Trainers course that is to marked in Japan

Specific objective:

The specific objectives were:

• Understanding of general KAIZEN from 5S KAIZEN
• Understand productivity and quality improvement
• How to get prepared for the completion of the Master Training course.

3. TRAINING PROCEEDINGS

The training highlighted on the following areas as summarised below:

Day 1- Covered the Introduction on general review of 5s KAIZEN, Overview of the training session. It then followed the topic on Productivity improvement whereby participants were exposed to the terms like what is Productivity? What is Efficiency? What is Waste? What is Loss and the like. In order for participants to understand this topic, the instructor used both group and individual assignment for the purposes of comprehending the subject matter.

Day 2- Covered the production system. In this topic issues like Production Management, Structure of Production system, Type of Production Control System, Production Process Indicator of Production Process, Cost Breakdown of Product and Production Process Planning were intensively presented with exercises.

Day 3- Covered the quality improvement. In this subject matter the following were thoroughly taught; what is quality; Concept of quality; Outline of total quality improvement and others related. The subject was a bit challenging to understand. However, the instructor pointed out that things will be much easier during the second training in Japan.

Day 4 and 5 were much covered by workshops/exercises where group discussion and presentations followed by the instructors' guidance were highly employed. Finally the fifth day was covered by Guidance on the 3rd Round On-Site Training.

4. FINDINGS

Most of the concepts were very new to participants as they were required to come in the classroom with calculators for simple mathematics calculations.

Participants discovered that KAIZEN is beyond 5S applications and therefore they were very interested to understand on how to apply general Kaizen to the current enterprises under the programme.

Whenever they (participants) found difficulties were advised to hold on until training in Japan which will entail sufficient information in both practice and theory.

5. WAY FORWARD

The names of participants (Trainers) were announced with the enterprises to guide in 3rd round. Trainers were urged to have made several visits and making sure that the time of leaving for Japan the enterprise has something to continue doing.

Finally, participants did the training evaluation by filling the forms with regards the entire five day training.

By Richard Jackson – One of the Trainers