Kaizen is a process to improve processes and systems within your business continuously. This guide to Kaizen will show you the basics, which will help you and your business run more efficiently. Here’s how to get started.
This beginners guide to Kaizen is for people who have never heard of Kaizen before and want to learn more about it.
What is Kaizen, and why should you care?
Kaizen refers to a strategy where employees at all company levels work together regularly in an ongoing effort to achieve incremental improvements. Kaizen is a continuous process that can help create a powerful engine for progress. It combines the collective talents within the company. Kaizen events should always align with your strategic goals. A continuous delivery approach will help you to not only identify change but also deliver it.
Kaizen, meaning change for the better, is a Japanese business philosophy applied to any kind of business. It is a process that aims to improve processes and systems within your business continuously. Kaizen is not a “one and done” process but rather a way of constantly improving processes and procedures. Kaizen is an ongoing process that will help your business to run better. The Kaizen philosophy is not just a buzzword or an unexpected way to improve your business. Kaizen comes from the Japanese culture and is a natural part of their culture. The kaizen philosophy has been used in Japanese culture for centuries and is heavily utilised in Lean manufacturing.
As you can see, Kaizen, or continual improvement, has been around for a very long time. It was coined in the business context by Dr Masaaki Imai in his book The Mind of Lean. He defined Kaizen as “The process of achieving quality through small incremental improvements over an extended period of time”. In other words, if you want to improve your business and make sure that it is continuously improving, then you need to be doing Kaizen!
The first principle of the Three Principles of Management is “Continuous Improvement”. In this article, we will discuss how you can apply these principles at work. We’ll also look at some examples of what it looks like when people use them independently.
But what does this mean?
How do we go about implementing Kaizen into our businesses?
And how can we measure its success?
Let me start with some definitions:
Guide to Kaizen – What Is Continuous Improvement/Continual Improvement?
Continuous improvement is simply making changes regularly – whether they are big or small. There is a focus on small change with Kaizen and Continuous Improvement; however, the techniques can be used to address more extensive or more radical change also but maybe best to take those on after your teams have learnt by doing several projects.
It’s about doing things differently, and it can be as simple as changing the way you do something to make your business more efficient. It could also mean taking an entirely new approach to help you achieve better results in less time. You may just want to reduce your cycle time.
The critical thing with continuous improvement is implementing change and measuring what happens after implementing those improvements. You need the impact before deciding whether to keep going down this path. Kaizen should by its very nature have continuous feedback and learning.
If you don’t measure anything, then how can you tell if you have made progress? If you want to improve your sales performance, for example, one of the best ways to find out if you are improving is by tracking your monthly sales figures over some time. This data gives you some idea of where you stand compared to other businesses selling similar products/services. You may want to measure outcomes in terms of customer satisfaction or reducing business waste.
Most modern organizations have either a continuous improvement approach or are seeking ongoing process improvement, intending to deliver a Kaizen culture in their organizations. Whatever process improvement method you are using, a kaizen culture is positive for an improvement project. With faster feedback and feedback loops Kaizen does fit with Agile principles.
Guide to Kaizen – What is Lean?
Lean manufacturing has been around for a long time. It was first introduced in the Toyota Production System by Taiichi Ohno, who developed it to improve its manufacturing processes. The TPS aims to enhance quality and reduce costs through continuous improvements. In other words, lean focuses on eliminating waste from production systems, although the philosophy is relevant to all processes. Waste is anything that does not add value or improve efficiency.
Guide to Kaizen – The eight wastes of Lean (Muda)
Based on this original article
Transport
Waste in transportation can happen in several ways. To give you a better idea of what we’re talking about, here is an example:
Waste in transportation includes moving people, tools, inventory, equipment, or products further than necessary.
Excessive movement of materials can lead to product damage and defects.
Excessive movement of people and equipment can lead to unnecessary work, more significant wear and tear, and exhaustion.
Employees at an office or factory setting should be composed of individuals who work well with one another. If they stay close to one another, there’s a greater chance that tasks can be completed quickly and more efficiently for their current process. In a factory situation or manufacturing process, it is essential to keep materials necessary for manufacturing close by at the production level rather than having them travel to several different sources each time.
Inventory
Most business owners tend to think of extra inventory as a resource they should always have on hand in case of an emergency, but storing unnecessary stock can lead to many problems. Over-purchasing or over-producing, for example, results in unnecessary costs that could instead be invested by the company elsewhere. Excess inventory can also cause product defects which end up wasting time and money. It’s vital as a small business owner to ensure you aren’t falling into this trap!
Office clutter is caused by countless things with as many harmful impacts on the environment. One example includes files waiting to be worked on, customers waiting for service, unused records in a database, or obsolete files. Manufacturing clutter can come from broken machines sitting around, more finished products than demanded, extra materials taking up the workspace, and finished products that the company cannot sell.
Some countermeasures for inventory include:
purchasing raw materials only when needed and in quantity needed
reducing buffers between production steps
creating a queue system to prevent overproduction.
Motion
Motion waste is the unnecessary movement by workers that slows them down, creates more tasks to complete, and can lead to injuries or other medical complications. Motion waste includes walking, lifting, stretching, bending, rotating – pretty much any sort of unnecessary movement that isn’t directly related to the task at hand.
The waste in motion includes any unnecessary movement of people, equipment, or machinery. In the office, this can consist of walking to get material, being too cluttered, picking through the inventory to find what is needed, excessive mouse clicks when scrolling online or checking emails, and other forms of duplication. At a manufacturing facility, the excess motion includes reaching for materials and installing components that are not needed.
Waiting
The waste of waiting often results in excess inventory or overproduction. By reducing the time required waiting on materials or equipment, we can increase flow throughout a given process resulting in decreased lead times. To help lessen the impact of “waiting” wastes, quality managers can
Set up standard work instructions for employees.
Employ multi-skilled workers who are capable of adapting quickly to the tasks at hand.
Help avoid downtime (that could come from waiting on assistance from outside sources or staff members before starting a specific task).
Productivity is decreased when employees have to wait unnecessarily for material or equipment to arrive, when their machine breaks down with an incomplete order sitting in its queue, or when they are stopped from working by distractions.
Overproduction
Overworking or over-utilizing working equipment can lead to many problems. For instance, it could cause the manufacturing department’s workflow to become unorganized and make it harder for managers to supervise appropriately. And using excess production capacity can quickly deplete your business’ capital reserves.
Believe it or not, some companies out there in the past would pour more concrete than they needed to because they were under pressure from their employees who wanted to feel useful. Sure it’s tempting to pass the time when you have an idle worker or piece of equipment that can be put to work and be paid for simultaneously, but this will cause a lot of problems. Creating manufactured products when they are needed can be done using something called a just in time philosophy.
Using this approach will prevent your company from having excess stock in storage, having quality control issues within the waste-in-process inventory (WIP), needing extra cash on hand or capital equipment expenditures, and even cause excessive lead times since much of your production-line inventory is buried somewhere in a warehouse instead of on the line with product waiting for customers to buy it off of it!
Over-processing
Over-processing can lead to over-delivering, spending more money than necessary, adding unnecessary steps in the workflow, or even delivering products and services that your customers don’t want/need. In manufacturing, this could include using higher precision equipment than necessary, using components with capacities beyond what is required, running more analysis than needed, over-engineering a solution, adjusting a component after it has already been installed, and having more functionalities in a product than needed.
In the office, over-processing can include generating more detailed reports than needed, having unnecessary steps in the purchasing process, requiring unnecessary signatures on a document, double-entry of data, requiring more forms than needed, and having an extra step in a workflow.
Defects
Defects occur when the product is not fit for use. Which typically results in either reworking or scrapping the product. Both results are wasteful as they add additional costs to the operations without delivering any value to the customer.
Defects can be costly. By introducing countermeasures such as defect prevention methods and defect detection strategies, companies will save money in the long run by reducing their waste and increasing profits in the future by preventing defects and their negative financial consequences. Product quality is essential to all segments of industry, producers, and customers alike; it also directly influences a company’s profitability.
Skills
The 8th waste has been part of the Toyota Production System for many years now, and most people are aware of it. Even though the practise itself isn’t exclusive to Toyota, you’ll often hear people describe the 8th waste as the waste of unused human potential. Unused human potential is how organizations separate the roles of management from that of employees. For example, in some companies, managers are primarily responsible for planning and organizing production processes whilst those who do the actual work in production follow orders and execute their jobs without having any say in what they do or methods most suitable to their tasks. This is bad because frontline workers (people doing the physical work) are the ones who know what best practices should be adopted during any given task, so they’re often empathetic to come up with solutions themselves when problems arise too. This happens more than we think because this is where good ideas originate.
When a company doesn’t utilize its human resources, it’s eventually choking off a vital source of success and will have poor employee morale. In manufacturing, this waste can be seen when employees are poorly trained, do not know how to operate equipment effectively, or when the facility doesn’t allow employees to offer their opinions about workflow and productivity or hire genuinely qualified and passionate people about what they do.
One demonstrable performance improvement step you can undertake is to give people the right tools to do the job. Traditionally many people have used tools like Visio but there are tools that help the improvement process and improve business efficiency for your teams.
Read the other parts of the Beginners Guide To Kaizen
Continuous improvement is simply making changes regularly – whether they are big or small. There is a focus on small change with Kaizen and Continuous Improvement; however, the techniques can be used to address more extensive or more radical change also but maybe best to take those on after your teams have learnt by doing several projects.
It’s about doing things differently, and it can be as simple as changing the way you do something to make your business more efficient. It could also mean taking an entirely new approach to help you achieve better results in less time. You may just want to reduce your cycle time.
The critical thing with continuous improvement is implementing change and measuring what happens after implementing those improvements. You need the impact before deciding whether to keep going down this path. Kaizen should by its very nature have continuous feedback and learning.
If you don’t measure anything, then how can you tell if you have made progress? If you want to improve your sales performance, for example, one of the best ways to find out if you are improving is by tracking your monthly sales figures over some time. This data gives you some idea of where you stand compared to other businesses selling similar products/services. You may want to measure outcomes in terms of customer satisfaction or reducing business waste.
Most modern organizations have either a continuous improvement approach or are seeking ongoing process improvement, intending to deliver a Kaizen culture in their organizations. Whatever process improvement method you are using, a kaizen culture is positive for an improvement project. With faster feedback and feedback loops Kaizen does fit with Agile principles.
Guide to Kaizen – The eight wastes of Lean (Muda)
Based on this original article
