Mr. San comes with over 20 years experience in the Banking and IT sector. His company has over 10,000 employees in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Delhi and Pune.

He shared with us the differences between the operation of a Japanese company and that of an Indian counterpart. In Japan, focus is high on the quality of the product and also their expectations are higher. He took the example of ATM machines. An average Indian customer is willing to compromise his time to find an alternate ATM to a broken one, but in Japan it’s not like that. If there is an ATM machine, people expect that it’s working. So if they close the ATM machine for 1 minute, it needs to be made public through press release in the newspaper. Also, in Japan you have both functionalities, notes and coins that can be withdrawn from the ATM.

Therefore in Japan, the emphasis is high on quality. This means a product should be defect free. The errors that will be tolerated are very very low.

For example, 99.9 and 99.999 is the expected quality of the product, which are referred to as 3 9’s and 5 9’s respectively.

99.9 % means there is a down time of 1 day business in the entire year, whereas 99.999% means a few minutes of business stopped in a year.

To achieve this, the focus is on having a meticulous planning and perception to error. This allows them to prepare for adversities.

There is also a huge focus on Analytics to understand key usages of a customer, frequency, requirements etc. This customer knowledge being incorporated into technology and its the backend task on testing done on the software by software testers.

Every company has Analytics, Developers and Testers working in building the company forward.

It was overwhelming to understand the intricacies and details of how quality is achieved and maintained in the Japanese firms.