Lean IT, Six Sigma, and Kaizen are all valuable frameworks for improvement. Lean is used to limit waste within existing processes to improve a company’s efficiency. On the other hand, Six Sigma targets identifying and eliminating specific issues that cause errors or lead to waste. Kaizen methods come at it from a different perspective. It is less about fixing problems and letting employees inject their innovations into projects (as in Lean IT) or eliminating known sources of error and improving products (as in Six Sigma) it is about incremental improvements.
Kaizen can have the same effect that agile, lean IT, or Six Sigma does — but often with less effort because of its approach. The goal of Kaizen is centred on bringing minor improvements in a non-intrusive manner, so it’s easy to implement and adhere to. Like a toolbox, though, we would always suggest you select the right tools for the job and use Kaizen as part of your organization’s improvement strategy. Kaizen is a continuous improvement model.
Benefits of Kaizen for business
Practising Kaizen methods helps deliver many benefits to an organization, from the evident productivity and efficiency benefits to cultural shifts like improved communication, morale, satisfaction and engagement. A continuous improvement culture is a positive strategic change that will lay the foundation for your organization to change and thrive. Here are some of the direct benefits you can achieve in your business:
Improved productivity
Improved quality
Improved morale and satisfaction
Better safety
Reduced costs
Improved communication
Increased sales/growth
Improved customer satisfaction
Continuous Improvement Culture
How can you implement Kaizen in your organization?
Getting started with Kaizen on a small scale is relatively easy. Its focus is on small change and continuous improvement. It is straightforward to test at a small scale with just one project or team. To implement it inside an organization, though, is much more complicated. That’s why we have created this series of top tips to help you avoid some of the common challenges we have encountered in projects over the years.
Kaizen for Business – Top 10 Tips for getting started
1 Senior Leadership Buy-In
An essential part of Kaizen Culture is that it needs to be a top-down and bottom up initiative, so senior leadership buy-in is crucial. Kaizen isn’t a strategy that can be implemented just by the leadership team or the team on the ground. It will take every member of your organization working together to achieve the common goal. Everything from the people who answer the phones to the CEO has to believe in Kaizen to be successful.
Senior leaders need to ensure your service improvement initiatives are strategically aligned have the right focus on things such as business waste, customer satisfaction or business performance.
2 Create a network of Kaizen Agents
Leadership needs to be shown at all levels in the organization around Kaizen. As with many Lean initiatives, it is more of a mindset than a set of prescriptive tools and actions. Make sure these agents understand the history and philosophy of Kaizen and can explain its use to their colleagues in solving business problems in Gemba Kaizen events.
Building this culture and network of agents helps to create a company culture of continuous improvement. This cultural shift is vital to sustaining and embedding the change to a continual improvement approach. These agents become your leads and key contacts for services improvement and are critical parts of your Continuous Improvement journey.
3 Empower the employees
Say what you do, and do what you say. We have all been on projects and programmes where the strategy does not match the actual activity. Suppose you are going to move to a Kaizen or continuous improvement approach. It would be best if you empowered your people to work on the work. This is about trusting that a scientific approach to improvement will deliver outcomes that need to be implemented, and positive change will happen.
Let the people that know about the processes work on improving them. Trust the outcomes and empower the teams to change and improve. Support your employees by making training available in the Kaizen approach.
4 Don’t eat the iceberg
Start small, and make it easy for your new Kaizen agents to learn their craft. Looking for small changes makes it far easier for stakeholders to feel like they can contribute, which is more accessible “How do we save 10% of our budget next year” or “How can you make 1% improvements to the job you do”. Test and implement minor changes to start. This increases the speed of improvement and buys into the approach. Get people involved in change, empower them to make the change, make their changes, see the benefits, learn, iterate, motivate and engage. This is a very positive framework for change.
Kaizen can deliver small or large changes, but you could do a short Kaizen sprint as an introduction. Here you would deliver everything from day one of a multi-day Kaizen event. Use this as an action learning event where people will learn some kaizen principles whilst working on their process.
Select a single process that has a current reason for improvement (a burning platform will always help increase buy-in for a change)
Set a target of finding 1% improvements across this process, which we can implement right now
Map and understand the current process and identify the value and wastes
Identify challenges, ideas and innovations to find 1% improvements
Prioritize ideas based on ability to implement immediately
Evaluate the current process understand the costs/times related to the current process
Produce a future state map and evaluate potential benefits
Retrospective – evaluate what you have achieved during the day and any learning points
This sprint is a great way to introduce and explain Kaizen principles with a real action learning set and a great way to look to solve a real business problem. Depending on the nature of the problem, you may choose to amend the target outcomes, but this approach can provide an actual practical exercise and business benefits. With the right tools, you can achieve all of this in a day.
Don’t just leave this process here. If you have come up with some great ideas (and you will), make sure you take the next step of starting another sprint to refine those ideas and start to test and implement them.
5 Document your processes
In our experience, it is infrequent to be given a current and up to date process as an introduction to an improvement project. Most projects I have been involved in either had no documented process or a process that was outdated or incomplete. You might as well have had no process.
Documenting your current process is a valuable exercise. Getting a shared visualization of the current state and its wastes helps get everyone to own the baseline and the position we will start from, don’t assume people understand the end to end process. In our experience, they don’t. They do understand the part they do and any targets relating to that part.
Once you have your As-Is and develop your future (To Be) process or processes, you should create a new process model. This model serves many purposes as you implement a change like a specification for developers or user training material. Having the right tools helps your improvers improve.
Your To Be maps should also enable you to compare the benefits of changes and the current state, which helps you decide what changes to invest your money in. This does not replace measuring outcomes but helps evaluate options efficiently to make better business decisions.
6 Standardized Work
An exercise like the one above, if nothing else, will help you to standardize your process. You have taken a significant first step by discussing it with everyone involved and having a shared visualization of the process and problems. You can now start to set down your standard process. New processes need to be standardized, but there is benefit in just understanding and standardizing the As-Is process.
As Taiichi Ohno says, “Without standards, there can be no Kaizen”. I interpret this as saying you cannot improve if you do not have a current process that is both understood and standardized.
For improvements to last, they must be repeatable. Improvements should start with a policy that standardizes work as the baseline for setting new, better processes. Setting rules on how to perform tasks and document the new policies ensure successful implementation of changes. Employees involved in making improvements effectively play the role of quality control experts and role models. Standardizing work will avoid wasting time by reducing variability in processes; it will also help promote discipline to achieve continuous improvement.
7 Give people the tools to do the job
It is straightforward to produce a picture of a process in many free and paid tools. It is true that a picture paints a thousand words, but believe in the W Edwards Deming quote, “Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion”. If you want people to come up with business cases for a change, maybe you should equip them with software that helps them do that. I don’t hire a plumber to fix my pipes and expect them to do it with a spoon. Would you please not ask people to improve processes and say do it with Post It’s and brown paper, Visio or Miro?
We can help with the best tools. But maybe, more importantly, we can help you get the most out of those tools. As an organization, we focus on giving you the tools and helping you get the most out of them. We help you to build continuous improvement capability in your organization.
8 Don’t be a cult
Kaizen is one of the tools in your improvement toolbox. Different problems need different approaches, and new improvement frameworks will emerge over time. The least successful approaches to improvement we see are where a business adopts a particular framework to answer all their problems in a very cultish way. Kaizen and continuous improvement are foundations of good organizations; however, they are not all solutions.
The best organizations we see operating adopt a mixed methodology approach to change and innovation and selecting the right tools for the right jobs.
9 Embed the thinking
Just like with appropriate tools, you also need to support your users with the knowledge and understanding of your approach. Lean favours an approach to learning where you learn by doing and then expand the knowledge based on what the user needs to tackle the real issues they are encountering. This does not mean there is no need for training; quite the opposite.
You need to plan an approach to scheduling and delivering training and coaching to your Kaizen agents when they need it. You can, of course, choose to buy this in or deliver it yourselves. Still, the aim should always be to grow your organizational knowledge and skills to sustain the capability without outside assistance.
10 Iterate and iterate everything
Whatever you decide as your initial framework for improvement, practice the Kaizen philosophy on your programme. The approach should not be set in stone, and just as with other processes, you need to learn and iterate. Adjust your approach to improvement regularly to remove waste and increase value. Follow the same steps and demonstrate the commitment to a Kaizen approach by running the programme in that way.
You may want to consider some external coaching support to help you review and evaluate to act as a critical friend in the exercise. This enables all of your team to participate rather than some need to facilitate in this event.
Kaizen for Business – Summary
Businesses of all sizes are always looking for ways to improve their processes and systems to operate more efficiently. Kaizen is a process that will show you how to continuously improve your business and achieve results that you wouldn’t have thought possible. If you’re ready to start improving your business, let’s get started! We hope that this article has inspired you to implement Kaizen in your own business. If you have any further questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us today.
If you want to find out more about how we can help your Continuous Improvement journey why not book a free consultation
Read the other parts of the Beginners Guide To Kaizen
Practising Kaizen methods helps deliver many benefits to an organization, from the evident productivity and efficiency benefits to cultural shifts like improved communication, morale, satisfaction and engagement. A continuous improvement culture is a positive strategic change that will lay the foundation for your organization to change and thrive. Here are some of the direct benefits you can achieve in your business:
