The Hindu Business Line : Kaizen for continuous improvement

This is one of the many Japanese concepts that have found their way into Western management classrooms and corporates. The Japanese word’s meaning is closest to ‘improvement’; but in management parlance, it means ‘continuous improvement’.

Kaizen is about making incremental changes in processes at different stages and in a coordinated fashion such that the overall impact of the small improvements is often huge.

It has been used in improving manufacturing processes; and it has also been used in service industry processes. The Kaizen philosophy is a core part of management concepts such as quality circles.

Kaizen stands in sharp contrast to more radical and sweeping methods of realising process improvement, such as Business Process Re-engineering. The comparison is not so much about which method is better or worse, but about which method is applicable in what situation.

One of the differentiators between Kaizen and more radical improvement mechanisms is that Kaizen is people-oriented. It calls for cooperation between labour and management, and requires continued commitment from just about every single employee of the company. Some of the corporates that swear by Kaizen have as a target that not even one day should go without at least one small improvement.

One of the key concepts behind Kaizen is the elimination of waste by studying the process and the needed outcome in depth. Another backbone concept is that improvements are brought about by employees working in small groups.

The five Ss are also important in Kaizen implementation, as is process-oriented thinking as opposed to result-oriented thinking. Perhaps the most important element of the Kaizen philosophy is that it is not a top-down approach. Every employee is encouraged to study the process that he or she is involved in and come up with improvements to make it more efficient. Little drops of water, as we are all taught in childhood, often make a mighty ocean.

There is also a concept known as mini-Kaizen, where each employee is encouraged to solve small problems in his /her own immediate work area, with a minimum investment of time. This often also has the significant spin-off benefit of making the employee more engaged in the work.

The father of Kaizen is accepted to be Masaaki Imai. He introduced this concept to the world in 1986 and then improved on it himself. In recent years, he has become an ardent advocate of using just-in-time manufacturing principles in place of the batch system.

There is no cultural bias to Kaizen and it can be adopted by any company anywhere, provided there is top management commitment to making it work. As Imai said some years ago, “Japanese management practices succeed simply because they are good management practices. This success has little to do with cultural factors. And the lack of cultural bias means that these practices can be — and are — just as successfully employed elsewhere.

“Thus, while Toyota is probably the most famous company to try our Kaizen and endorse it, many Western companies have also adopted it and implemented it successfully.”

(Contributed by Ashok R. Sankethi, CEO, Kaybase, a business consulting firm. Mail: ashok@kaybase.com)

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