Revisiting the Need to Increase Efficiency in the Japanese Service Industry

Back when I was still an employee at the logistics division of the major Southeast Asian e-commerce operator Lazada Group, I undertook an initiative at the warehouse to improve the speed at which orders are processed. The idea was to rearrange the physical layout of the area designated for processing and packaging products bound for delivery to customers so that workers can get the work done without moving as much. By pushing tables together and laying down rudimentary slides for packages to travel between different processing stations, the exercise shaved off about two seconds from the time it takes to process one order.

For a layman, that accomplishment insignificant. But across the span of a massive logistical operation, two seconds off a single order can quickly add up to major savings. With the company now processing some 10,000 orders per day, saving two seconds off one order is equivalent to a savings of 20,000 seconds, or five and a half man-hours per day. For a warehouse that is working practically 24/7 to pump out orders, that means more than 160 extra hours are squeezed out every month to do more orders. All that capacity increase started out with only a few physical rearrangements that cost nothing to implement.

It often feels as though the Japanese service industry is lacking that spirit of seeking out infinitesimal changes in order to achieve massive efficiency increase, a point addressed in an earlier post. The lack of attention to process improvement is particularly clear when in service jobs that require repetitive work that is akin to an assembly line in a factory. While Japanese factories have largely increased productivity through automation and standardization of procedures to drive down costs of production, restaurants, hospitals, and other customer-facing businesses have not been nearly as eager in axing excess personnel to increase productivity.

A great example of the neglected possibilities of productivity increases is found when undergoing a health check in a Japanese clinic. The health check process is the same for all customers: height, weight, eyes, X-ray, blood, and doctor's examination. And the staff does a fine job ensuring all customers go through all the different stations. But the process with which the customers are guided and information passed around is a source of so much wasted energy and time that, even for a casual observer, it would be easy to see the staff becoming tired and stressed after handling hundreds of customers every day.

Some of the waste is directly related to the concept of omotenashi, illustrated by the need for utmost politeness in addressing every customer. Even though at the reception, every customer is assigned a number that stays with him/her throughout the entire health check process, the staff of every station does not merely call out the numbers. Instead, they shout out "The customer with the number A, are you here?  Please come to B station now" for every person. The extra words are simply not necessary when a quick "Number A!" would suffice.

Other waste is related to the set up of the process. With the main customer waiting area smack in the middle of all the different stations, staff from each station are forced to walk around the waiting area to handle over files to the next station. While this design allows customers to get to the stations faster, the customer-centric design is at the expense of staff having to go back and forth. Considering that each customer only needs to go through the process once while clinic staff needs to handle hundreds of customers a day, it is uncertain whether sacrificing staff welfare for customers is worth it in this case.

The reality of a place like a clinic running health checks show that it is rather sensical for the Japanese service industry to rely more on automation. Staff members do not need to repeatedly shout out full sentences to get the attention of every customer and walk the same route to hand over files. Robots can do that just as well, tirelessly, and at a lower cost. Given that the service industry in Japan is plagued by relatively high labor costs and a lack of available labor, especially in specialized roles such as medicine, it makes sense to delegate more peripheral, repetitive work, to automated processes.

In some ways, this more automated future of the Japanese service industry is already here. A local chain restaurant has replaced staff bringing meals to the customer's table with a pickup window where the customer goes up to pick up the meal him/herself when an automated voice call his order number. The faceless process, completely devoid of human interaction in any way, would be considered a taboo in terms of omotenashi. But as the country realizes the need to squeeze more efficiency out of fewer workers, it will no doubt become ever more common.