Aravind Case Study Introduction In a country plagued by curable and needless blindness, 58 year-old surgeon Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy recognized upon retirement that his 100,000 sight-restoring surgeries were not enough of an impact to fight blindness in India and cure the 12 million people affected by it. With a big dream, but no money, no business plan, and no safety net, he embarked on a journey to start an organization with a single purpose in mind: to give sight for all. Starting with a small 11-bed clinic, he went on to create the Aravind Eye Care System, today’s largest and most productive blindness-prevention organization on the planet, which sees more than 2.5 million patients a year. With the success that Innovation At most eye hospitals, before a surgery a patient undergoes a basic vision test, preliminary examination, measurement of ocular pressure, pupil dilation, and a final examination. An ophthalmologist usually does all of this. However, at Aravind this is done differently, and the entire stream of activities is broken up into sets of discrete tasks. These individual tasks are given to a group of employees and their sole focus is on doing their own job. This works the same in the operating rooms with the goal of maximizing the time and skill of Aravind’s surgeons. Surgeons don’t do anything else but operate, with the nurses, almost systematically handling everything else. (See Figure 1) The Aravind assembly line processes lead to high efficiency, with operations for cataracts taking around 10 minutes to complete, which is 3 times faster than anywhere else in the world. Meanwhile lag times between operation is just 1 to 3 minutes, versus 15 minutes in other hospitals in India. Aravind is always looking to cut down on unnecessary delays and avoidable irregularities, and in finding places where small changes in efficiency can have big impacts on overall productivity. These innovative assembly line processes applied in their hospitals has been one of the strongest
