Lean Manufacturing Practices — Kaizen
At Toyota they have been doing the same thing for decades. The Lean Manufacturing world calls it a “Kaizen event,” and it is a key element of the process which Toyota have used to build cars faster, cheaper, and better every year. They gather together a team and ask them to spend a day working to come up with improvements, and then go out on the floor and implement them.
The Kaizen event’s first and most obvious benefit is that provides time for improvements to be implemented immediately and regularly. But when it is a regular process, there are other benefits. Employees are encouraged to develop a pattern of looking for improvement opportunities, so they can have something to suggest to the team at the next event. The whole team takes ownership of the improvement process, and individual employees begin to see themselves as a team. There’s also a certain energy that is generated by making changes in real time.
At Toyota Kaizen is not just an event, but a continuous process of improvement, but the event is a key to developing a culture where continuous improvement is just part of the routine.
IT Departments need Kaizen events, new technology is coming at them faster than they can manage, processes aren’t automated just because nobody has a free couple of hours, and things can get messy very quickly. If your people aren’t motivated to improve the processes in their area, and feel frustrated with the demands of their work, you can help them by carving out time to have a Kaizen event once a month. Give them the tools and resources they need, and let them loose improving the things they touch every day.
I think it is good way forinvolvement of people , but I donot know how it differs from brain storming, what are the tools of this way of management.
The Kaizan event is unlike brainstorming in that immediate action is performed. If there’s no version control for our apache configuration files. The traditional way of handling this might be to brainstorm various possible improvements and assign a task to do that improvement. But Kaizan says, just do it. Set up subversion and check those files in during the event.
If these events are done regularly, and people are expected to make real improvements, they will think about improvement more often, and make them a part of the everyday fabric of the work. Then you move from the strange obsession with events, to continuous improvement, which is the real goal of Kaizan.
kaizan is a Japanese word under no circumstances to be confused with kaizen:
改竄 kaizan (n,vs) altering; falsification; faking
改善 kaizen (n,vs) betterment; improvement; incremental and continuous improvement
So remember to spell check your buzzwords, kids!
(This helpful hint is from everything2.com)
In this article one major thing was left out, who taught this system to Toyota? Dr. Edward Deming an American did after WWII, SPC, Statistical Process Control was taught to them when the American companies would not embrace this “culture” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming
Excellent paper Mark
How does this differ to six sigma in respect to identifying defects 3.4 and Kaizen continuous improvement?
Thanks
Simon
Pls Tell Me some Tips Of Kaizan Improment of Technical Plant.
My idea of this is a variation of empowerment.With a “lets do it” approach, we are virtually empowing people to do what needs to be done. In my experience in pulp and paper, we enhanced both Kaizan and Empowerment by utilizing a structured Professional Development Day for “off shift” employees who would cometo the mill for sessions of “development, open round table, kick the can as well as proffessional involvment regarding systems and procedural teaching.
The core of our employees would be encouraged to research and develop a presentation on any of their subsiquent ideas and were given time in upcoming “PD Days” to show the group what they found or wished to present for improvement or cost reduction…..