Kaizen: All you need to know

 

Kaizen is a business philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement across the entire organization. The pursue of the kaizen model is to help companies focus on gradually and consistently increasing efficiency and reducing waste within processes. That doesn't mean alterations happen slowly. The kaizen process simply recognizes that small changes now can have huge impacts in the future.

To achieve all this, kaizen encourages input from any employee, from the factory floor to the most senior management.

The kaizen method became popular in Japan, at manufacturers like Toyota. Kaizen can broadly be translated as means continuous improvement in Japanese.

There are five fundamental Kaizen principles that are embedded in every tool and behaviour:

1. Know your customer

2. Let it Flow

3. Go to Gemba

4. Empower People

5. Be Transparent

Traditionally, kaizen has been known for its events, usually a three- to five-day team workshop in which employees, managers, and sometimes C-suite executives make an actionable plan to improve an existing process. Kaizen events often follow Gemba Walks or the discovery of an inefficiency. We have spoken about Gemba Walks in the past, these are visits to workplaces where management teams can witness processes, talk to employees, gather insights, and identify any issues. You can read more about Gemba Walks in here.

After you’ve identified problems or bottlenecks in a process, start making small, continuous improvements. During the kaizen event, team members collaborate and think of solutions. The ideal outcome of these events is an actionable plan that is ready for implementation.

Kaizen events can take many forms to best serve their business application.

1. Focused-improvement kaizen. A focused-improvement event is a kaizen event centred on a single, known issue. Prioritize your most important losses and develop solutions to eliminate them.

2. Waste kaizen. This type of event focuses on eliminating waste in your processes, as opposed to improving systems that are currently working.

3. Error-proofing kaizen. Use this type of event to reduce human error by improving processes. This could be as simple as standardizing checklists, automating parts of a system or using Poka Yoke which we talked about here.

4. Lead-time kaizen. This kind of event is suitable when you realize one of your processes is taking too long. The event aims to reduce the amount of time it takes to complete a process, like the time from processing an order to the customer receiving their goods.

How to run a Kaizen event:

There is not a unique way to conduct a kaizen event but the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) framework is common and often recommended method.

1. Plan

The Gemba Walk, mapping your value stream, and identifying the problems in your processes are part of the planning stage in a PDCA cycle. Follow these steps to get started.

• Speak to employees. They’re the people who know the daily process better than anyone, so find out what problems or issues they're aware of.
• Define and analyse the problem. When you’ve decided which issue to tackle, break it down and find the bottleneck in the process.
• Establish the metrics you’ll use to measure success. Without this data it’s impossible to analyse the results after you’ve tested the solution.
• Decide on a goal. You should have one goal that is achievable within the event time frame.
• Work as a team to find solutions to the problem. There should be no limits on the kind of solutions encouraged. Allow employees to use their creativity. Choose one with potential to start with.

2. Do

Run a small-scale test of your chosen solution. Make sure every team member involved is aware of the change and let it run long enough to gather meaningful data and feedback.

3. Check

Collect data from your test and assess its success.

4. Act or adjust

If the test was a success, scale, implement your improved process company-wide or as a permanent update. However, if you found issues, or if the solution didn’t work, refine the process, and run further tests or choose a different solution and try again.

This should be a cyclical process. The kaizen event might be a one-time event but the process of improving never stops. To keep the continuous loop going, repeat the cycle. Find more processes to improve or try out other solutions.