On Tuesday morning, the Jamaica Productivity Centre (JPC) hosted a special breakfast session for its key stakeholders – government, private sector and unions – to emphasize the importance of building a productivity culture and movement in Jamaica in 2011.

State Minister in the Ministry of Labour and Social Security, Andrew Gallimore, argued that “Every Jamaican needs to be thinking about productivity” and that, relative to our global competition, we are not “currently in the game”. Indeed, he noted that Jamaica’s 35 year productivity decline (to 2007) of approximately 1.5 per cent per annum had increased to 1.8 per cent in the period 2003 to 2007, in a period when even the rest of Caribbean was seeing increased productivity of between 1.5 to two per cent. For example, in 1997 the average Trinidadian was three times more productive than the average Jamaican, whilst last year he was six times more productive. He revealed that as the result of an energy audit of just his Ministry building alone, they had managed to save $6 million in electricity costs with no new technology, but simply a change in attitude on the part of employees.

Critically, the event was also a farewell to Makoto Oyama, a Japanese productivity expert who had been working at the Centre since January 2009 through the sponsorship of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) under its Senior Volunteer Programme.

Oyama began his “Finding and Recommendations” for Jamaica by noting that Jamaica’s “obstacles to growth” included a lack of industry to absorb the labour force. Furthermore, he argued every industry in Jamaica could improve its productivity by between 20 and 200 percent. The key issue is where can we absorb this surplus workforce. His suggestions included agriculture, tourism, the medical industry e.g. nursing homes as well as information technology e.g. call centres.

He observed that despite the 2030 vision, during his time here, the leading organization to plan growth (PIOJ) had appeared to be almost “invisible” in terms of focusing on which industries Jamaica needed to strengthen (it should be noted that this is expected to change shortly).

He believed that Jamaican organizations needed to strengthen “work assignments”, meaning the appropriate number of workers to do a job, as well as their morale and what he called their “morals”. With regard to the latter, he noted that in his visits to factories he had observed idling, chatting, napping, littering etc, all within work hours. He believed this needed to be addressed by the strong implementation of the proposed national transformation programme.

Managers also needed to play their part by leading, coaching and instructing. Finally, capital needed to reinvest to create a bigger pie, with the “fruits of improvement” shared not only with the owner but with customers (in the form of new products and price reduction), reinvestment (in new equipment as well as research and development), human resources and the community, with dividends actually coming last. Every company taking this approach would seek to “grow up to compete with those overseas.”

Oyama briefly outlined two Japanese productivity techniques, the seven “wastes” and the five “S”s.

The seven wastes are over -production (don’t make extra items), inventory (avoid excess stock), motion (reduce activity required to do something), waiting (avoid time lost e.g. persons watching machines who could do other things), transportation (avoid moving items more than necessary e.g. from one location to another, as this doesn’t add value), excessive processing and defects (rework increases costs).

The five “S”s are : “seiri” meaning sort (separate what you need from what you don’t need and remove the rest), “seiton”, meaning simplify; organize, or set in order “A place for everything and everything in its place”; “seiso” meaning systematic cleaning of your workplace (cleaning your workplace and maintaining your tools yourself allows one to detect problems), “seiketsu” meaning standardization of cleaning and identification methods so that they are consistently applied, becoming ingrained “not a rule but a culture”; “shitsuke” meaning sustainability (through training and discipline).

In our follow up interview, senior productivity specialist Ms Tamar Nelson, who had worked alongside Oyama over his two year period in Jamaica (and had also been trained in Japan), argued that their visits to Jamaican firms frequently revealed management and measurement as lacking as ‘you cannot improve what you can’t measure’. The firms they visited frequently had good systems which they failed to enforce (a management issue) resulting in waste and inefficiencies. In addition to the previously mentioned measurement problem, Jamaican companies also fail to share successes or create synergies (strategic alliances) that can result in economies of scale In her view, Jamaica’s critical issue of productivity cannot be addressed by any one individual or an entity but involves a multi-faceted approach with national focus and buy-in.

At the same meeting, the Japanese Embassy’s First Secretary, Tadahiko Yamaguchi, also announced Oyama’s replacement, Akira Tonouchi, to whom Oyama had passed “the relay baton of productivity”, as he put it.