Quick and Easy Kaizen #8 - Recharging station

Quick and Easy Kaizen is an improvement that you can easily do for yourself that improves a process by improving quality, saving time, and so forth. The book, The Idea Generator, by Norm Bodek addresses quick and easy Kaizen and I have been practicing this technique at work for some time. Using the ideas from Norm's book, I have added improvements at home and here are some that have made my life better but didn't require that much time and effort to implement.

#8 Recharging station


Don't you hate it when your cell phone goes dead? Well, because of our re-charging station, I have never run our of battery life yet on my phone. This is a very simple kaizen that took about 5 minutes to set up and complete.

I used an existing power strip and installed it in to recharge anyone's phone in my family that wanted to use it.



The process is that in the evening, the phones(and our digital camera) get put in the home position to recharge. They charge until I turn it off the strip for the night. In the morning, I turn it on when I'm up and all devices get a full charge without everything being on all night and creating a phantom load and wasting electricity.

This improvement has helped improve our phone availability and reduce phone outages due to battery failures.

Cost: Nothing-already owned power strip.
Time to install-about three minutes

Before: Cell phones wouldn't get recharged regularly, fail due to battery not charged properly.
After: Cell phones charged daily, improve availability.

What have you improved today?

Dan Lafever
Kaizeneer