Comments on: Lean Manufacturing Practices — Kaizen

By: Small-Business | Business Improvement In Practice And Process: How Small Businesses Get Ahead Of Their Competitors | Besthottip.com

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 09:52:04 +0000

[...] Kaizan groups break down your business processes into components that you can monitor for performance. Within the measurements, the group seek instances of best performance that if adopted generally could improve the performance of the whole business. You could extend this by seeking out best practices not just in your own company by in your suppliers and customers. When you have found how other do a process quicker, cheaper and to a better standard, you apply this benchmark to improve your own performance. [...]

By: Kuniyoshi Takahashi

Kuniyoshi Takahashi — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 14:06:08 +0000

We had an interview with professor Monden who is the author of Toyota Production System. He lives in Tokyo where I live now. He currently is a professor of Mejiro University still working on Toyota Production System.
Please take a look at this interview.
http://www.lean-manufacturing-japan.com/interviews/toyota_production_system.html

By: Michael Mackett

Michael Mackett — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:46:32 +0000

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…..

By: sunil sharma

sunil sharma — Tue, 27 May 2008 06:51:01 +0000

Pls Tell Me some Tips Of Kaizan Improment of Technical Plant.

By: simon smith

simon smith — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 21:16:59 +0000

Excellent paper Mark

How does this differ to six sigma in respect to identifying defects 3.4 and Kaizen continuous improvement?

Thanks

Simon

By: David

David — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 12:23:53 +0000

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

By: Robert Coe

Robert Coe — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 16:04:54 +0000

kaizan is a Japanese word under no circumstances to be confused with kaizen:

æ”¹ç«„ kaizan (n,vs) altering; falsification; faking

æ”¹å–„ kaizen (n,vs) betterment; improvement; incremental and continuous improvement

So remember to spell check your buzzwords, kids!
(This helpful hint is from everything2.com)

By: Mark Ramm

Mark Ramm — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 00:43:08 +0000

The kaizen 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.

By: faisal sabir suliman

faisal sabir suliman — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 03:25:46 +0000

I think it is good way for involvement of people, but I donot know how it differs from brain storming, what are the tools of this way of management.