KAIZEN

 Kaizen is a Japanese quality improvement philosophy

named after the phrase “continuous improvement.”
Kaizen aims to create a quality oriented culture that
permeates all levels of the business from
manufacturing to management and aims to improve
the organization in small increments from the ground
up.

Kaizen is the father of many quality improvement

procedures including: suggestion systems, automation,
small group activities, Kanban, just-in-time, zero
defects, total productive maintenance, total quality
control, and more.
 According to Kaizen management has two
major components:
1.maintenance
2.improvement
 The objective of the maintenance function is to
maintain current technological, managerial, and
operating standards. The improvement function is
aimed at improving current standards. Under the
maintenance function, the management must first
establish policies, rules, directives and standard
operating procedures (SOPs) and then work
towards ensuring that everybody follows SOP.
The latter is achieved through a combination of
discipline and human resource development
measures. Under the improvement function,
management works continuously towards
revising the current standards, once they have
been mastered, and establishing higher ones.
Improvement can be broken down between
innovation and Kaizen.
The Key Kaizen Practices
 The key Kaizen practices are:
 Mindset & Culture
  customer orientation
  quality control (QC) circles
  suggestion system
  discipline in the workplace
  small-group activities
  cooperative labor-management
  relations
  total quality control (TQC)
  quality improvement
Production Process
 The production process are:
  automation & robotics
  autonomation
  zero defects
  total productive maintenance
  (TPM)
  kamban
  just-in-time (JIT)
  productivity improvement
 new product development
Kaizen: Seven Key Concepts
 1.Standardize-Do-Check-Act (SDCA) to Plan-
DO-Check-Act (PDCA) - Follow the
 Shewhart cycle
 2.The next process is the customer – Ask what
you can do to improve product or services that
you pass along to the next process.
 3.Quality first – Improving quality automatically
improves cost and delivery, while focus on cost
usually causes deterioration in quality and
delivery.
 4.Market-in, product out – Instead of pushing
products into the market and hoping customers
will buy them, ask potential customers what they
need/want and develop products that meet these
needs and wants.
 5.Upstream management – The sooner in the
design/pilot test/production/market cycle a
problem can be found and corrected, the less time
and money is wasted.
 6.Speak with data – The statistical tools from
Exhibit 4 will provide data for convincing
arguments.
 7.Variability control and recurrence
prevention – Ask ‘Why?’ five times to get
to the real cause of a problem and to avoid
just treating the effect of the problem.
Kaizen’s Problem-Solving Tools
 P – Plan
Pick a project (Pareto Principle)
Gather data (Histogram and Control Charts)
Find cause (Process Flow Diagram and Cause/Effect
Diagram
Pick likely causes (Pareto Principle and Scatter
Diagrams)
Try Solution (Cause/Effect 0who, what, why, when,
where, how
 D – Do
 Implement solution
 C – Check
 Monitor results (Pareto, Histograms, and
Control Charts)
 A – Act
 Standardize on new process
Kaizen’s Seven Deadly Wastes
 1.Overproduction – Production more than
production schedule
 2.Waiting – Poor balance of work; operator
attention time
 3.Transportation – Long moves; re-
stacking; pick up/put down
 4.Processing – Protecting parts for
transport to another process
 5.Inventory – Too much material ahead of
process hides problems
 6.Motion – Walking to get parts because of
space taken by high WIP.
 7.Defects – Material and labor are wasted;
capacity is lost at bottleneck