Chariot Comics
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: Chariot Comics
A] Tools and techniques that can be used:
Kaizen : The company needs to train all the process owners for continuous improvement in the respective processes
FMEA: This tool will help Chariot Comics to identify and correct the failures in the process & thus in the comics and that too according to the importance of the impact. Thus, it will help the organization to identify the problem areas and thus reduce the MLT for Comic production.
Standardization: Generally the characters used in the comics are same, only changes are in the postures they are depicted. In order to maintain consistency of character shape, colour, hair density etc, and standard templates can be maintained in computer tools . This would ease the job to just drag and drop in future versions of the comics
Line Balancing: By cross job training the artist doing pencilling for inking and the train the artist who does inking to handle pencilling a lot of work can be done and proper utilization of recources will lead to higher efficiencies.
Poka Yoka: Poka Yoke techniques like the color shade pallets can be made so that there is consistent coloring in all the comics . i.e. a particular characters shade should be constant
Demand Forecasting: As the company expects to grow its subscriber base in hard copies and typically such comics have pre decide schedules before the next issue is released, it is very crucial to assess the right demand and plan the production accordingly
Job rotation: Job rotation in forms of short stints at various processes involved in the production of comic can give a feel of the work that goes in to each of the artist. With understanding of complete flow of things, continuous improvement can be achieved through feedback from all the people at different stages of process.
Takt Time: The Company needs to understand how frequently are the readers willing to buy the new issue? Are the readers willing to subscribe to new issue every week, every month or every fortnight? This would help in getting the cycle time or production lead time the Company can afford to spend while developing new issue and channelize energy to reduce the production time accordingly.
B] Improvement Plan
Cross functional skill development for Inking and Pencilling artists to share workload and help faster delivery of comic issues
Since it is observed that the bottlenecks in the process is penciling, standardization can be done to reduce the overall process time
Being a people dependent industry, it is essential to keep the artist motivated to work. This motivation can come through providing good working conditions, job rotation