Kaizen involves every employee in making change--in
most cases small, incremental changes. It focuses
on identifying problems at their source, solving them
at their source, and changing standards to ensure
the problem stays solved. It's not unusual for Kaizen
to result in 25 to 30 suggestions per employee, per
year, and to have over 90% of those implemented.
For example, Toyota is well-known as one of the leaders
in using Kaizen. In 1999 at one U.S. plant, 7,000
Toyota employees submitted over 75,000 suggestions,
of which 99% were implemented.
These continual small improvements add up to major
benefits. They result in improved productivity, improved
quality, better safety, faster delivery, lower costs,
and greater customer satisfaction. On top of these
benefits to the company, employees working in Kaizen-based
companies generally find work to be easier and more
enjoyable--resulting in higher employee moral and
job satisfaction, and lower turn-over.
With every employee looking for ways to make improvements,
you can expect results such as:
Kaizen Reduces Waste in areas such as inventory,
waiting times, transportation, worker motion, employee
skills, over production, excess quality and in processes.
Kaizen Improves space utilization, product
quality, use of capital, communications, production
capacity and employee retention.
Kaizen Provides immediate results. Instead
of focusing on large, capital intensive improvements,
Kaizen focuses on creative investments that continually
solve large numbers of small problems. Large, capital
projects and major changes will still be needed, and
Kaizen will also improve the capital projects process,
but the real power of Kaizen is in the on-going process
of continually making small improvements that improve
processes and reduce waste.
Learn how Fleetwood benefited from implementing
Kaizen in this article reprinted from Quality
Digest. And read about how Sony, in Terra Haute, Indiana,
used Kaizen to dramatically
improve production in an article reprinted from Manufacturing
& Technology News.
More information about Kaizen:
What Is Kaizen?
Getting Started
With Kaizen
The above Kaizen article by: Steve Hudgik
