What is Kaizen

Kaizen is Japanese for continuous improvement. Learn basics of Kaizen, Kaizen Blitz and how to implement in your organization.

The word Kaizen is taken from the Japanese Kai “change” and Zen “good”. This is referred to as incremental improvement on a continuous basis and involving all employees. The important term here is involvement of all employees, as this initiative is driven with maximum participation of shop floor employees.

Kaizen is not run by one small team looking for breakthrough improvement rather it encourages employees to report a problem and suggest solutions to rectify it or come up with other improvement ideas.

Kaizen encourages employee engagement and they feel being part of the system and decision making as they participate in different Kaizen activities. Kaizen provides employees a chance to think about process improvements and a platform to put forward their ideas in front of the management. Most of the organizations have Reward and Recognition attached with Kaizen, this improves participation levels among employees. All this results into better job satisfaction, involvement and makes the job more fulfilling.

Kaizen is an umbrella term for:

Productivity improvement

Total Quality management

Zero defects

Just in Time

Suggestion system

The Kaizen strategy involves following key themes

1. Kaizen management

Management is committed to and encourages kaizen practices, it should form part of the overall company strategy. It includes proper implementation and plan for training, listening posts, reviews, rewards etc. The strategy needs to be driven from the top with full support of the management. Management may need to deploy a team of experienced professionals to deploy the overall strategy and to make sure that it moves in the right direction.

Periodic reviews by the top management is imperative and it installs a sense of urgency and importance of Kaizen in the overall scheme of things. This shows the commitment of top management and they should participate in the Reward and Recognition events.

2. Quality first

Quality is of the highest priority and this culture needs to be imbibed in every employee from the moment they join the organization. Quality is measured in terms of customer satisfaction from the product or service. Customer satisfaction here means meeting or exceeding customer expectations from your end customer or your internal customers.

Quality can’t be limited to Quality function only, but every employee is responsible for the quality of the product. Employees should be trained on quality concepts and basic quality tools. Kaizen actually encourages employees from all levels to participate in the quality improvement process.

3. Eliminate waste and use of Lean tools

Elimination of non-value add or Muda is a very important part of kaizen. Employees are trained to identify Muda in the process and come up with solutions to remove them. All employees should be trained on Lean tools and identifying what is waste, these trainings should be provided at periodic intervals.

In our organization we have different training plans for different levels, but we make sure that all employees at the floor should know what are non-value add activities. We train them with examples from their operations. Along with these classroom trainings, we also use daily briefings, white boards and banners to improve awareness among our employees.