Akshaya Patra striving towards excellence in feeding children

The Akshaya Patra Foundation implements the mid-day meal programme in nine states of India. It works in a Public-Private Partnership model thereby receiving support from the Central Government, State Governments and generous donors. It is always in the stride for bettering its process and operations so that it is always geared up to feed more and more children. Akshaya Patra has adopted a continual programme under the umbrella named Akshaya Pragathi Program.

The Akshaya Pragathi Program is an initiative to further streamline and improve the already existing good practices within the Foundation. It is an initiative that will help increase efficiency of the existing process in feeding children. Some of the continual improvement programs under the

Akshaya Pragathi Program are Kaizen, Six Sigma and other various continual improvement projects. One of the simple yet effective models under this initiative is PDCA-Plan, Do, Check, Act. PDCA is an effective series of step-wise check on process efficiency and it also allows for quick an immediate addressing of issues. Kaizen (Kai=continual, Zen=improvement) system focuses on making creative investments to solve small problems, thereby contributing to the greater whole.

Six Sigma is another improvement programme under this initiative of Akshaya Patra. It is a five step process that helps an organisation to reach world class efficiency. The five steps are: Define what’s important, Measure how you are doing, Analyse what is wrong, Improve by fixing what is wrong and Control to guarantee performance abbreviated as DMAIC.

The whole motto of the Akshaya Pragathi Program and the various improvement processes under it is to improve and sustain good practices in implementation of the mid-day meal programme. Akshaya Patra is well aware that to feed 5 million children by 2020, it requires having a full proof and standard operating system to carry out the programme. To achieve this employees across the board are trained on these improvement processes. As training is an integral part of the whole system, the Quality Department conducted more than 6,000 man hours of training on 5S, Lean and Kaizen, GMP and ISO Awareness across all locations. Witnessing the positive results, the Quality Department aims to conduct 15,000 man hours of training over the financial period of 2013-14.

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