In Japanese, Kaizen means Improvement.
Kaizen - Continuous Improvement
In Quality Management, Kaizen is a Japanese philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement for all functions of a business, from manufacturing to management involving everyone at all levels in the organization. Kaizen was first implemented in several Japanese businesses during the country’s recovery after World War II and has since spread to businesses throughout the world. Kaizen has been proven effective in a number of major Japanese and Western companies, and many large organization in America and Europe are adopting the Kaizen.
Unlike many Western management techniques, which treat employees as numbers to be crunched for maximum efficiency, kaizen takes the opposite outlook, proposing essentially that a happy employee is a productive employee.
The foundation of the Kaizen method consists of 5 elements:
- Teamwork: A strong company is a company that pulls together everyone in every level. Kaizen aims to help employee and management look at themselves as members of a team, rather than competitors.
- Personal Discipline: A team cannot succeed without each member commitment to personal discipline and everyone ensures that the team will remain strong.
- Improved morale: Strong morale among the workforce is a crucial step to achieving long-term efficiency and productivity, and Kaizen sets it as a foundational task to keep constant contact with employee morale.
- Quality circles: Groups which meet to discuss quality levels concerning all aspects of a company’s process.
- Suggestions for improvement: By requesting feedback from each member of the team, the management ensures that all problems are looked at and addressed before they become significant.
In addition to the foundations, there are three key factors in Kaizen:
- Elimination all the waste (muda) and inefficiency
- Kaizen five-S framework for good housekeeping
- Seiri – tidiness
- Seiton – orderliness
- Seiso – cleanliness
- Seiketsu – standardized clean-up
- Shitsuke – discipline
- Standardization: standardizing as many aspects of the organization as is possible and by improving standardized activities and processes, Kaizen aims to eliminate waste.
Video about What is Kaizen on Youtube
Learn the concept of Kaizen from this video.
Resources
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen
- http://www.1000ventures.com/business_guide/mgmt_kaizen_main.html
