Kaizen

Kaizen is a Japanese term meaning "change for the better" or "continuous improvement." It is a Japanese business philosophy regarding the processes that continuously improve operations and involve all employees.

Kaizen means all personnel are expected to stop their work when they encounter any abnormality and, along with their supervisor, suggest an improvement to resolve the abnormality.

Kaizen consists of five key principles including:

• 1. Know your customer
• 2. Let it flow
• 3. Go to Gemba (or 'the real place')
• 4. Empower people
• 5. Be transparent.

These five principles lead to three major outcomes: elimination of waste (also referred to as economic efficiency), good housekeeping, and standardization. Ideally, kaizen becomes so ingrained in a company's culture that it eventually becomes natural to employees.

Kaizen events are working sessions with a cross-functional team, not a planning event. The purpose is to complete a specific set of tasks by the end of the session. Some of the time is spent determining what to change, but most of the time is spent implementing the improvement ideas, then validating that the improvements were successful and embraced. The goal is to implement 80% of the actions during the event, with the remaining 20% of the improvements completed within the next 30 days.

A Kaizen burst event should be part of an overall program of continuous improvement. If a stand-alone event, then it may hinder the success of the event, and the gains might not be sustained.

The history of the kaizen event (called Kaizen Blitz) started with Japanese consultants Yoshiki Iwata and Chihiro Nakao (who worked at Toyota Gosei) who wanted to help companies make improvements. However, incremental improvements were difficult to support due to travel from Japan to the US. The improvements were accelerated into a week-long event in 1988 at Jacobs Vehicle Equipment Company ("Jake's Brakes"), at the request of President George Koenigsaecker.

It was initially called "Five Days and One Night," meaning you would learn and work for five days and get very little sleep during the week. It should be called kaikaku, which means radical change, where kaizen means small incremental improvement.

Kaizen sees improvement in productivity as a gradual and methodical process. The concept of kaizen encompasses a wide range of ideas. It involves making the work environment more efficient and effective by creating a team atmosphere, improving everyday procedures, ensuring employee engagement, and making a job more fulfilling, less tiring, and safer.

Some of the key objectives of the kaizen philosophy include quality control, just-in-time delivery, standardized work, the use of efficient equipment, and the elimination of waste. The overall goal of kaizen is to make small changes over a period to create improvements within a company. That doesn't mean alterations happen slowly; it simply recognizes that small changes now can have huge impacts in the future. Improvements can come from any employee at any time. The idea is that everyone has a stake in the company's success, and everyone should strive, always, to help make the business model better.