Another year has come and gone and, at the end of the winter, a trip to Japan was in order to show how we had improved. ISS sent the following representatives to the KAIZEN Conference: D. Hlaváč, V. Pavlůsek, S. Zádrapa and P. Jaroščák. They introduced the aforementioned change to the GTMS product group.
After a long journey around half a world, rainy Japan welcomed us. The weather got much better the next day. It was still winter in Japan, about 5°C, but snow could only be seen on the mountaintops.
Before the conference started we spent some time getting familiar with Japanese culture. Japanese people are very warm-hearted and Japanese food is worth trying. Let me mention some experiences: nose-blowing in public is considered to be very rude; a European man of average height makes uniformed school girls laugh; and if you cannot use chopsticks, you may starve for a day or two.
This year’s KAIZEN Conference was held in the town of Takasaki between Tokyo and Osaka. In fact a subsidiary of the Nippon Kayaku Pharmaceutical Division was to organize the conference. We had a chance to take a look at the firm’s production line, albeit from behind a glass wall. The production line was extremely clean, even cleaner than at our firm.
It was the 54th conference. Besides ISS, there were 23 other candidates presenting their work. To make a long story short, we did not win. The winner was KSM from Mexico with their introduction of storage optimization.
During the KAIZEN Conference, we had a fantastic chance to meet and shake hands with personalities we had only seen in company magazines. For me, personally, it was really interesting to find out that Nippon Kayaku connects companies with huge varieties of products.
Vojtěch Pavlůsek, ISS employee
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