I worked in a factory in 2006-2007 which was a vendor to Nokia which was making 50m + phones annually from its Sriperumbudur factory. Nokia's supplier development effort was the exact opposite of "jugaad" and closer to a tough sports coaching program - thousands of quality audits and 5-why reports later, they pretty much coached us into a textbook lean operation. I'm still in awe of how good their operational processes were. Our yield was pretty atrocious at the start, but we were competing favorably with their established chinese supplier towards the end. My experience tells me that Apple has a path to success but it requires a lot of patience, consistency and continuous improvement.
Indeed. thank you for this vignette, Sandeep. I agree that belief in Jugaad is a philosophy that is holding back from achieving scale in practice. Given the wage advantage in the region, there is still some runway to achieve the scale, Indeed, as you mentioned, it requires patience, consistency, and continuous improvement.
I worked in a factory in 2006-2007 which was a vendor to Nokia which was making 50m + phones annually from its Sriperumbudur factory. Nokia's supplier development effort was the exact opposite of "jugaad" and closer to a tough sports coaching program - thousands of quality audits and 5-why reports later, they pretty much coached us into a textbook lean operation. I'm still in awe of how good their operational processes were. Our yield was pretty atrocious at the start, but we were competing favorably with their established chinese supplier towards the end. My experience tells me that Apple has a path to success but it requires a lot of patience, consistency and continuous improvement.
Indeed. thank you for this vignette, Sandeep. I agree that belief in Jugaad is a philosophy that is holding back from achieving scale in practice. Given the wage advantage in the region, there is still some runway to achieve the scale, Indeed, as you mentioned, it requires patience, consistency, and continuous improvement.