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| The first My Record notebook, top, when the project started, and successors showing various changes in design |
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Five or so employees joined Fujisawa in Tokyo's Happoen in May 1962, where they talked about the My Record project and shared excerpts from their notebooks. These young employees were chosen from various offices and factories. Ryuji Ito-then Saitama Factory's head of the Management Subsection, Maintenance Section-who a day earlier had been named to chair the discussion, suggested that everyone read a part of his record as a means of introduction. Fujisawa listened to each employee with keen interest.
Ito, using his notebook, related that in March 1961, during the production adjustment of Super Cubs, he had been inspired by a good-natured talk given by Fujisawa. Ito described how the employees came together to implement a plan of preventive maintenance for machinery and equipment during a five-day production-line break. He showed pages with graphs displaying production fluctuations and inventory movements. Pages were filled with key points for handling new equipment, as well as for preventative maintenance. There were pages of outline reports on the lectures and training seminars that he had attended.
Fujisawa was overjoyed, saying: "You have all done a great job. That was precisely my wish: to have people even on the frontline make plans and record their achievements, and to have more and more people draw up plans concerning their dreams. You are using My Record just as I had pictured it." Then he signed Ito's two My Record notebooks.
Newly imported machinery and equipment was in those days met with the concerted effort of young workers who, with manuals in hand, dedicated themselves to Soichiro Honda's challenge of using the machinery to its full potential. Accordingly, Ito had recorded the knowledge acquired through such experience in his My Record notebook. Moreover, he had expanded those ideas in the form of standard operating manuals and other useful materials.
"Mr.Fujisawa encouraged me, saying, 'Go ahead and establish new guidelines with what you have learned by keeping such records. This is something that can only be done while you have a youthful, inquiring mind.' " Recalled Ito, "For me, the My Record project represented the creation of new rules. It was a history of challenges I took up to create manuals and systemize operations."
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