Lean Manufacturing: Kaizen

A team needs to be created to drive the Kaizen activities and to report gains to management. To have positive results on actions, it is very important to educate the workforce. Teams should be given proper Kaizen training, tools, and system structure to allow them to succeed. Coaching employees and encouraging them to become aware of problems and ways to improve every day is the cultural change Kaizen initiates. When employees take ownership of processes, it becomes natural to think about possible improvements as their responsibility, turning employees into a powerful engine for improvements. The successful use of Kaizen rests on gaining support for the approach across the organization, from senior management down. It is important to understand the three areas within any company that could be affected by defects. They are Product, Process and System. When acting on an improvement at the Product level, the Team needs to:
• Protect the Customer from receiving a poor-quality product; and
• Improve the value-added work. When acting on an improvement at the Process level, the Team needs to:
• Focus on preventing the process from producing waste. Try to eliminate unneeded steps and rearrange processes to reduce waste;
• Drive actions that will not generate an increase sales price. The customer is already paying for a quality product. The Customer is not responsible for your inefficiencies;
• Evaluate Cycle time to eliminate inefficiencies. Combine steps when possible to simplify the process. Work on process organization utilizing 6S; and
• Consider how to train personnel on updated processes documentation. When acting on an improvement at the System level, the Team needs to:
• Implement a way for the System to predict and react when wastes are identified.
• Avoid adding additional processes that will end up costing more money; and
• Consider what system will drive the transformation to sustain the improvement. Kaizen works directly with Standardized Work. Standardized Work relates to the living documentation used to document and give formality to the process, and which will continually evolve through Kaizen. Kaizen focuses on building a culture where all employees are actively engaged in suggesting and organizing implementation of improvements within the company. Kaizen is not only limited to manufacturing or production processes but can be applied to any process within the company. Kaizen is based on making small incremental improvements in the processes and work standards.