The concept of kaizen encompasses a wide range of ideas. It involves making the work environment more efficient and effective by creating a team atmosphere, improving everyday procedures, ensuring employee engagement, and making a job more fulfilling, less tiring, and safer.

For example, the purchase of a new forklift which optimizes two or more production stations would be flow kaizen. This type of kaizen focuses on removing waste from individual processes. For example, the operator of the forklift moves some inventory around to allow for a faster loading and unloading time at a station.

The Kaizen approach consists of 5 founding elements :

• teamwork,
• personal discipline,
• improved morale,
• quality circles,
• suggestions for improvement.

Kaizen Event Planning in 7 Simple Steps

1. Appoint a Skilled Facilitator. Strong leadership is essential to a successful Kaizen event.
2. Make Sure that Leadership is Engaged.
3. Set the Scope and Limits of the Event.
4. Assemble the Team.
5. Define Success.
6. Provide Training.
7. Outline the Event Schedule.

The Four Main Kaizen Principles are:

• Visualize – tools that will help you visualize how your change process will look like.
• Measure – Being consistent is key to making improvements.
• Improve – The principles of kaizen are split into four categories: process, product, people, and environment.
• Repeat – Repeat the process.

The three pillars of kaizen, standardization, 5S, and elimination of waste, are critical to achieving the goals.

10 principles of Kaizen

• Let go of assumptions.
• Be proactive about solving problems.
• Don’t accept the status quo.
• Let go of perfectionism and take an attitude of iterative, adaptive change.
• Look for solutions as you find mistakes.
• Create an environment in which everyone feels empowered to contribute.

A Kaizen event has four key phases: Selecting, Planning, Implementing and Follow Up.

7 Kaizen tools to reduce waste and improve Lean Process

• Value Stream Mapping, (VSM)
• Suppliers, Inputs, Process, Outputs & Customers, (SIPOC)
• Fishbone Diagrammatic Approach.
• Pareto Analysis.
• 5S.
• Target Progress Report.
• Kaizen Newspaper.

As taught in the Lean Six Sigma course, a Kaizen Event brings together all the people involved in making a process work correctly . This includes operators of a process, their direct managers, executives and other stakeholders. At these events, the focus is completely on the process under discussion and nothing else.

Putting Kaizen into Action in Your Personal Life Select a personal area for improvement. Identify small, specific tasks that will contribute towards your goal. Prioritize your actions. Create a timeline for each task. Keep track of your progress. Add steps until you reach your objective.

Kaizen (Continuous Improvement) is a strategy where employees at all levels of a company work together proactively to achieve regular, incremental improvements to the manufacturing process. In a sense, it combines the collective talents within a company to create a powerful engine for improvement.