How the Adoption of Kaizen is Helping Akshaya Patra

The fact that Akshaya Patra’s Hubballi kitchen featured in the NGCs Mega Kitchens of India alongside the likes of TajSATS Air Catering Ltd., speaks volumes about its magnanimity. This particular kitchen has the capacity to prepare meals for over 200,000 children in approximately four hours. And this, mind you, is just one of the 22 centralised kitchens the Foundation operates across India … feeding over 1.5 million children as a part of the Mid-day Meal Programme in 11,360 schools every single day.

If Akshaya Patra has been able to pull off this task, it’s largely because of the tremendous efforts put in by each of the stakeholder involved, right from its employees to donors. Also playing a crucial role in its success is the ability to adapt and evolve. The organisation has adopted kaizen wherever possible with the aim to achieve overall excellence.

What is Kaizen All About?

In Japanese, kaizen means improvement or simply put, changing for better. The concept has become popular world over as one of the key attributes of an organisation’s long-term strategy. It is based on the belief that several small changes—over the course of time—help in achieving big results.

Akshaya Patra’s Kaizen Initiatives

Kaizen techniques have been put to use in various sectors, including government, health care, banking, and even NGOs. In fact, at Akshaya Patra, kaizens are adopted at various levels of operations to facilitate efficient use of resources, make the task cost effective, save time, and produce better results. When you serve mid-day meals to over 1.5 million children, it goes without saying that it’s imperative that your kitchen technology is at its efficient best—kaizens help Akshaya Patra pull off the task.

As a part of kaizen initiative, Akshaya Patra's Hubballi and Vasanthapura kitchens have started cooking rice with starch instead of draining it. In what can be considered an apt example of kaizen for effective use of resources, this helps these kitchens save around 11,000 and 6,000 litres of water respectively.

As for saving time, the preparation time for a single batch of rice which was 20 – 22 minutes before this kaizen method was implemented, has now been reduced to 15 – 19 minutes. Thus, 30 – 40 minutes are saved every day. Now half an hour may not seem like a lot of time, but consider the fact that mid-day meals are prepared in four hours of so, and you realise how important these 30 – 40 minutes are.

It’s also worth noting that the retention of starch adds to the nutritional content of the rice.

Kaizen initiatives have helped Akshaya Patra make the most of resources at its disposal elsewhere as well. In Guwahati, Assam, for instance, route analysis has helped in reducing the distance covered and diesel consumed by delivery vans, thus helping in saving time and making efficient use of resources.

Simple things like a design modification as a part of which the flat bottom of a silo at Surat kitchen was turned into conical bottom, replacing plastic wipers with durable wipers made of stainless steel, or—for that matter—introducing cauldrons with safety locks has helped Akshaya Patra kitchens make the task of preparing and delivering mid-day meals much more effective.

Like we mentioned earlier, kaizen is all about tweaking several small things to bring about a big overall change and Akshaya Patra has several examples of such initiatives. Not surprising then, is the fact that the Foundation has scaled up to feed over 1.5 million children across ten states since its inception and plans to reach 5 million children by 2020.

Now, that’s a goal that won’t be possible with kaizens alone. Other stakeholders will also have to pitch in. Regardless of whether you are an individual or organisation, one simple way to help is to donate to the NGO. In doing so, you will ensure that Akshaya Patra reaches more children … nurtures more dreams.

The Akshaya Patra Foundation is an Ngo in India providing food for 1.6 million school children across 12 States and 28 locations.