Kaizen

You should continually look for ways to improve your knowledge, your performance, and your well-being.

Lean is a methodology aimed at the elimination of waste in every area of production or operation. In case you’re not familiar with Lean, it’s a process improvement methodology inspired by the small-step work improvement approach developed in the United States within World War II wartime manufacturing, and born out of postwar manufacturing improvements in the Toyota Production System. The goal of Lean is to incorporate less human effort, less inventory, less time to develop products or support services, and less space to become highly responsive to customer demand while producing top quality products and services in the most efficient and economical manner possible.

The focus of Lean is the virtual elimination of waste, with waste defined as anything that hinders the value-added flow of product, service, or information to the customer. Lean follows a process of continuous improvement using a collection of analytical tools that when applied properly, can lead to significant improvements in cost, quality, and performance. Lean is used to develop continuous, one-piece flow systems of people, machines, materials, data, and facilities.

Besides manufacturing, many of the tools and techniques applied in Lean are also directly applicable in a transactional or business environment. In addition, one of the core concepts of the Lean methodology is Kaizen, (pronounced: ‘k “zén). This is the Japanese philosophy of continuous incremental improvement. Kaizen literally means “good change,” and tries to make sustainable improvements to benefit the entire process, and not an individual part. Kaizen does not look to fundamentally change systems and processes, but rather, to optimize existing systems. As improvement is achieved, process controls and procedures are modified to sustain the change. Key foundational elements of Kaizen include quality, effort, involvement of all employees, willingness to change, communication, teamwork, personal discipline, improved morale, quality circles, and suggestions for improvement.

At Toyota, Kaizen usually only produces small improvements (mostly improvements that are implemented within the same day); however, the culture of continual small improvements and standardization yields large results in terms of overall improvement in productivity. In business, Kaizen is used to optimize process results. However, the word, Kaizen, actually originates from a Japanese life philosophy. The philosophy assumes that every aspect of your life deserves to be constantly improved, and anyone can take a Kaizen approach in both their personal and professional lives to make almost daily incremental improvements that will benefit them long-term.

According to Kaizen, it is never good enough to do things as you have always done. You should continually look for ways to improve your knowledge, your performance, and your well-being.