Kaizen

From HMCwiki

Kaizen is the Japanese improvement concept that saves only a few minutes here and there, but amount to untold hours of reduced frustration. The average Japanese worker comes up with 32 ideas per employee per year. While American counterparts comes up with one idea per employee per year. What is the difference? The mindset. The environment. The infrastructure. Yes! Kaizen is the concept of small incremental change generated and tested by the employee. There is a Japanese proverb: A mountain is made of many specks of dust. Here fifty aspects describing it. Welcome to Kaizen!

Here are fifty aspects of Kaizen:

• Kaizen is selfish.
• Kaizen is fast.
• Kaizen is implemented then ask for approval.
• Kaizen empowers the staff.
• Kaizen requires resources and time for the staff to put into place the improvement.
• Kaizen requires freedom to change the existing system.
• Advisors have to "dig out Kaizen" from their staff to illustrate the degree of idea generation and implementation desired.
• Kaizen helps the worker and the organization.
• Kaizen is its own reward.
• Employees are welcome to go back to the old inefficient way of doing things, but who would?
• Kaizen is a mind set of doing it better.
• Kaizen knocks down pride of tradition and enriches pride of workmanship.
• Kaizen is incremental.
• Kaizen is continuous.
• Kaizen is expected.
• Kaizen is helpful.
• Kaizen is employee initiated.
• Kaizen includes improvements that save as little as six tenths of a second.
• Kaizen eliminates waste. That means effort, thought, redo.
• Kaizen can be a game; who can come up with the most improvements.
• Kaizen can be fun; who can think of the silliest idea.
• Kaizen can be extreme.
• Kaizen is thoughtful.
• It's main purpose is to expand customer service whether the customer is the next process, the person who walks into the store, the person on the next shift, even yourself.
• Kaizen is courageous. It requires guts to put ideas out that may at first seem absurd.
• Some places have what they call a "Kaizen person" who's purpose is to go around starting Kaizen fires among the staff.
• Kaizen should be documented, time savings estimated, net savings dedicated to further service, productivity, etc.
• Kaizen is humbling. Before anything can be improved one must first admit that what ever has already been created can be improved.
• Kaizen has immediate results.
• Kaizen can be mistake proofing.
• Kaizen can be visual control.
• Kaizen can answer questions before they are asked.
• Kaizen sweats the details.
• Kaizen looks for all the ways things can go wrong and corrects them before they happen.
• Kaizen is thoughtful. It looks at what is wrong in the work place and in small bits makes it right.
• Kaizen tool; brain writing.
• Kaizen gives the worker ownership over his part of the organization.
• Kaizen is support for the organization.
• Kaizen looks for problems, finds them, and fixes all or part of them.
• Kaizen can take five years before it gets down to the bottom line.
• Kaizen is destroyed by the rejection of an idea: rejection or consideration.
• Kaizen is improvement.
• Kaizen is an expectation, an integral part of your job.
• Kaizen is rearranging your work to make it work.
• Kaizen saves time.
• Kaizen looks at work processes as something to be perfected.
• Kaizen is a mind set bent on improving anything improvable.
• Kaizen is respect for the individual in his work place.
• Kaizen is creative.
• Kaizen is making every motion resourceful.
• Kaizen is employee suggestions in action.
• Kaizen makes you competitive.

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