YONGSAN GARRISON, South Korea — The ninjas at Yongsan don’t carry swords, but they are slashing costs at the garrison.
Initiated in March, the "Ninja" program trained 30 U.S. Army Garrison-Yongsan employees to present cost-saving ideas for consideration to the garrison commander.
Chet Witkowski, the management analyst who created the program, said he wanted to give employees, regardless of pay grade, a sense of involvement in processes within their sections.
Many employees, he said, had asked for more training, but financial constraints made it impractical to send them to Lean Six Sigma, a program the Army uses to teach ways to improve organizational efficiency.
Instead, he created the Ninja program, three days of training in which students learned about Lean Six Sigma.
"The training worked on trying to present ideas and quantify the benefits," he said.
Witkowski said the program empowers employees to "come up with ideas for how to make Yongsan a better place, a more efficient organization and to better serve our customers."
Witkowski said so far about 20 "working ideas" have come from Yongsan’s "ninjas," and 11 have been approved for implementation, resulting in a projected annual savings of more than $3 million.
The 11 "ninjas" who originated the ideas were recognized Monday with certificates from garrison commander Col. David Hall.
Among the ideas were plastic driver’s licenses to replace paper ones and an automated driver’s license database.
As of July 2, people seeking newly issued or renewed licenses for personal vehicles will receive brown plastic cards instead of the folding orange paper licenses issued since 1974.
The new licenses aren’t the only move the drivers testing facility is making away from paper.
As of March 3, drivers’ testing and application information was transferred from shelves of large paper cards to an electronic database. Previously cards had to be typed by hand, using a bilingual typewriter, which test administrator Yi Chun-cha said are no longer available for purchase.
Yi said license renewals will now be a matter of making changes to the database, instead of finding, retyping and filing cards.
Currently there are 9,000 driver’s licenses in use within the U.S. Army Garrison Yongsan area, with about 6,000 issued annually. Only 284 of the new plastic cards have been issued.
Future changes include access to a centralized server for all U.S. Forces Korea driver’s license offices and computerized driver’s tests. It hasn’t been determined yet how much money the new licenses and electronic databases will save.
The Ninja program differs from the Lean Six Sigma "Green Belt" process because Ninja projects can be implemented within 30 to 60 days of conception, whereas Green Belt projects can take up to a year.
Witkowski said he plans to take the program peninsula-wide in the near future.
What they’ve doneHere are some of the completed "Ninja" projects and the projected annual savings they generate:
Cooling outdoor electrical transformers only during summer months: $54,000Purchasing mattresses locally instead of having them shipped from the U.S.: $70,000Leaving furniture in place during quarters maintenance: $92,000Motion-sensing lights in garrison buildings: $59,000Consolidating cleaning contracts at Burke Towers housing complex: $140,000Source: Chet Witkowski, U.S. Army Garrison-Yongsan Plans, Analysis and Integration Office
