Organizations today need to improve, adapt, transform & reengineer its processes to meet the ever changing expectations of the customer. KAIZEN™ has been used in past and is still used by all kinds of organizations, whether manufacturing or service or government that need to cope up with such changing expectations. KAIZEN™ helps organization to become
Easier > Better > Faster >Cheaper.
These are the four purposes of improvement.
Easier = Make it a habit
Better = Improve quality
Faster = Reduce Lead Time
Cheaper = Reduce cost
These four goals appear in the order of priority said Shigeo Shingo once and this is what defines how excellent your operations are.
Today KAIZEN™ is recognized as an important pillar of an organization’s long-term competitive strategy. KAIZEN™ is based on certain guiding principles like:
- Good processes bring good results
- Go see for yourself to grasp the current situation
- Speak with data, manage by facts
- Take action to contain and correct root causes of problems
- Work as a team
- KAIZEN™ is everybody’s business
- And much more!
One of the most notable features of KAIZEN™ is that big results come from many small changes accumulated over time. However this has been misunderstood to mean that KAIZEN™ equals small changes. In fact, KAIZEN™ means everyone involved in making improvements. While the majority of changes may be small, the greatest impact may be kaizens that are led by senior management as transformational projects, or by cross-functional teams as KAIZEN™ events.
But please remember, there are
- No quick fixes
- No instant success
- No magic pill
- No secret steps
- No magic wand
The objective of KAIZEN™ should be
12 leadership paradigms of OE/ Kaizen
You can learn about KAIZEN™ from real life example and Lean gurus on the biggest Global Operational Excellence event at Frankfurt, Germany on November 5 – 6, 2015.