Kaizen

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Cottonfioc

Fine tuning isn't a box you can tick – it's an ongoing process.

How does change happen in your organization? Is it through major initiatives, or is it part of the ongoing way you work?

Some types of change inevitably need a major project, meaning months of hard work, big budgets, and upheaval.

But an alternative or complementary approach to improving systems and processes involves more subtle, ongoing changes. This approach is often undervalued.

One way to do this kind of continuous, incremental improvement is kaizen. It originated in Japan, and the word translates as "change (kai) for the good (zen)."

Kaizen is based on the philosophical belief that everything can be improved. With this approach, incremental changes add up to substantial changes over the longer term, without the need for radical innovation. It can be a much gentler and more employee-friendly way to institute the changes that must occur as a business grows and adapts to its changing environment.

Understanding the Approach

Because kaizen is more a philosophy than a specific tool, its approach is found in many different process-improvement methods, ranging from Total Quality Management (TQM)   to the use of employee suggestion boxes. With kaizen, all employees are responsible for identifying gaps and inefficiencies. And everyone, at every level in the organization, suggests where improvements can take place.

Kaizen aims for improvements in productivity, effectiveness and safety. But people who follow this approach often unlock a number of other benefits, too, including:

• Less waste – inventory is used more efficiently, as are employee skills.
• People are more satisfied – they have a direct impact on the way that things are done.
• Improved commitment – team members have more of a stake in their job, and are more inclined to contribute fully in their role.
• Improved retention – satisfied and engaged people are more likely to stay.
• Improved competitiveness – increases in efficiency tend to contribute to lower costs and higher-quality products.
• Improved consumer satisfaction – a result of creating higher-quality products with fewer faults.
• Improved problem solving – looking at processes from a solutions perspective allows employees to solve problems continuously.
• Improved teams – working together to solve problems helps to build and strengthen teams.

The kaizen philosophy was developed to improve manufacturing processes, and it's one of the elements that led to the success of Japanese manufacturing through high quality and low costs. However, you can gain the benefits of the kaizen approach in many other working environments, both on a personal level and for your whole team or organization.

Much of the focus in kaizen is on reducing "waste," and this waste takes several forms:

• Movement – moving materials around before further value can be added to them.
• Time – spent waiting (no value is being added during this time).
• Defects – which require extra work to rectify, or mean that products have to be thrown away.
• Overprocessing – doing more to the product than is necessary to give the customer maximum value for money.
• Variations – producing bespoke solutions when a standard one will work just as well.

The table below shows some examples of these forms of waste in an office environment.

Using Kaizen

Here's our suggested approach for using "kaizen thinking," either on your own or with your team:

1. Keep an "ideas log" of things that seem inefficient or that you'd like to improve. It's often easier to spot these in the heat of the moment than in cold reflection.
2. Once a month, spend some time identifying areas where there's "waste" in the way that you or your team members operate. Use your ideas log as input, but also think about the wider picture and your overall ways of working. Go through each of the types of waste listed above as a checklist. How could each form of waste be eliminated?
3. Plan out when you're going to make these changes. You need to strike a balance between getting on with making the improvements immediately (so that the area of waste doesn't become a bigger problem), and avoiding "change overload."
4. It's important to take into account any difficulties or confusion that your change could cause for others – which could, in turn, make them resistant to that change. A great way to assess the impact of any potential changes is to use the Impact Analysis Tool   .
5. Whenever upcoming changes affect others, be sure to consult them about the new arrangements, and listen to their comments and concerns.

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Kaizen is something that you can benefit from quickly as an individual. But embracing the approach with your team will take a concerted effort.

Here are some suggestions to help make kaizen work with your team:

• Learn – with your team – about the philosophy of kaizen.
• Allow everyone to submit their suggestions for improvements.
• Establish your overall kaizen approach and controls, creating a system to follow that everyone understands.
• Reward ideas, as the more ideas you generate, the more kaizen is at work in the day-to-day life of your team.