A Driver’s Idea That Saved Hundreds of Hours — and What It Says About ALJ

Kaizen at the Front Line

At an Abdul Latif Jameel Motors stockyard in Jeddah, a driver named Abdullah Osman Abdi noticed something no manager had flagged. Every day, he and his colleagues walked more than 150 meters — in extreme Saudi heat — to reach their designated vehicle lanes, moving between 20 and 40 cars per shift. He did the math, raised the issue with his supervisor, and within weeks the team had been reassigned to lanes near the exit gate. A task that once consumed three to four hours was done in 15 minutes.

When Hassan Jameel heard about the improvement, he made a point of visiting Abdullah in person. “It was a special day when Mr. Hassan Jameel met me,” Abdullah said. “I was overwhelmed and very happy, and I feel very much appreciated.”

That story is not an outlier. It is the operating logic of Abdul Latif Jameel. Kaizen — the Japanese philosophy of continuous, incremental improvement — sits at the center of how the company runs its 11,000-person global workforce.

Learned in Japan

Hassan Jameel’s introduction to kaizen was hands-on. He spent time in Japan during high school and university, then in 2004 joined Toyota’s domestic Kaizen division — the first non-Japanese person to hold a position there. His team would stand in front of workers with stopwatches and notepads, mapping every action during a shift, then color-code the results: wasted time, productive time, unproductive working time.

“My boss once told me, if you want to solve a problem, don’t add to it — subtract from it,” Hassan has said. The instruction captures how the philosophy differs from conventional business improvement: rather than layering new technology or process onto a problem, kaizen starts by removing waste.

Building the Culture

Abdul Latif Jameel now runs an internal program called “Best in Town,” focused on embedding kaizen across its global business units. More than 150 delegates from teams across multiple countries attended a recent regional conference in Saudi Arabia to share results.

The philosophy applies from the boardroom to the stockyard. Hassan has described the goal as building a culture where continuous improvement becomes automatic — “led by a generation of leaders who are brought up with this way of thinking.”

Over 80 years of business history, the Jameel family has built that culture incrementally — one Abdullah Osman at a time.