Small, Frequent, Better and Continuous
To begin, we should define what kaizen means to the Japanese. It is after all a Japanese word. Kaizen is made up of two words, “kai” and “zen”. “Kai” is translated to change, while ‘zen’ means to make good or make better. By putting these two words together, we arrive at the widely accepted translation which is “make a change for the better”.
When discussing kaizen in a TPS context, we refer to it as small, but frequent changes for the better to any process within a company. The goal is for a business to continuously improve each day as incremental change takes place. While this sounds straightforward enough, consider how many improvements take place in your company each day. Perhaps more poignantly, when you go home today, will your operation have changed for the better? What about tomorrow? And the next day?
As we begin to digest this change-for-the-better-every-day mindset, it becomes apparent that the sheer frequency of changes indicate that this is not a single person’s or even a specific group’s responsibility. Everybody plays a role; every team member, supervisor, manager and engineer must participate in the continuous improvement process by making and implementing kaizen. In fact, in the Toyota plants that we are familiar with, the goal for each team member is to make anywhere between 3 and 5 kaizen suggestions per month (the exact number depends on the specific plant). Three to five ideas per employee per month: now that’s change!
The 3 Rules
To aid an organization in the implementation of improvement ideas, TPS offers three rules that must always be followed when making and implementing suggestions. These are: 1) add no people to the process, 2) add no space and finally 3) spend no money. These three rules are very useful in channeling everybody’s mind towards improvement that will be both valid and relatively easy to implement.
Below we dive into the details of the three rules:
Add no People: The ultimate goal of any improvement is to increase value to the customer. Today’s customers measure value in terms of 1) quality and 2) cost and 3) lead-time. The manufacturer who can produce the best quality in the least amount of time at the lowest cost has a good chance of stealing market share from competitors. Adding people to a process most definitely reduces profits (by increasing labor expense).
Add no Space: Manufacturing floor space costs money both in terms of increased rents, as well as lost opportunity to build additional product. Although small amounts of space savings may not have an immediate impact on the lease cost, added up over time, space savings will allow us to build more product without the need for expansion. However, even if an immediate space reduction will not result in cost savings, this does not mean that space can be added.
Spend no money: When first seeking input from team members regarding improvement ideas, it is astonishing how much money everybody wants to spend. Suddenly every welder, machinist and engineer has the burning desire to spend a million dollars or more on a fancy piece of equipment or facility upgrade. Interestingly, this desire to splurge is not unique to the United States: it appears that Japanese workers have this same spending desire because TPS imposes the rule of not spending any money for improvements. We are to use what we have at hand to add value, which is our own ingenuity and intelligence to achieve improvements with what is readily available. This is an underlying assumption of kaizen.
Does It Really Work?
While each individual idea may not impact the business from the customer’s eyes, many consecutive improvements will not only be noticeable, but quite remarkable in their impact on the customer. In TPS terminology, this small but continuous improvement activity is often called acting more like a tortoise than a hare. As in the fable, the winner of the race is the tortoise, or the company who moves slowly, but steadily to consistently improve day in and day out. This is in contrast to attempting to sprint to the finish line by making significant investments in large and risky projects that have uncertain outcomes.
Another benefit of this “make-change-slowly-but-frequently” mindset is that if a particular change is not successful, the old way can be quickly restored without much disruption to the whole plant. In contrast, consider how quite impossible it is to reconsider the purchase of an expensive piece of equipment after it has been installed in your shop and is not meeting expectations.
Everybody Has Responsibility
The small kaizen improvements we have been talking about so far, should not come from management, but from the individual operator who completes the work everyday. After all, they are most familiar with their process. They are best positioned to think of the smallest details that will make their work less wasteful.
These team members should be encouraged to share their ideas with supervisors and managers. In turn, the supervisors and managers are required to provide feedback on each improvement idea. We should also mention that improvement suggestions do not need to be formally submitted in writing. Especially smaller ideas may require only a brief discussion between a team member and their immediate supervisor. There is no need to spend time discussing simple ideas. Of course, more complex improvements that will require a temporary production shut-down or that will impact others (moving a piece of equipment for example) may be submitted to the Operations Manager through a more formalized mechanism. It is very important that if an idea is not implemented, the team member should receive a formal communication from their supervisor explaining the reason (and it better be a good one) for not moving forward with the idea. Failure to do so guarantees the eventual termination of even the best intentioned program.
What About Those Big Ideas
If you have heard about kaizen activities lasting a whole week, you may be puzzled by what you have been reading so far. Up to this point, all of the discussion has revolved around quick improvements that are implemented in hours or days.
As mentioned in the opening paragraph of this article, there is such a thing as week-long kaizen workshops. These events tackle the larger, more complex production challenges that can not be solved by a single team member. In these situations, a group of anywhere between 4 – 12 employees leave their regular jobs for a week to focus on improving a particular process.
These groups may be lead by a manager, engineer or perhaps in the beginning by an outside specialist. The areas of focus that such groups will tackle may be:
• Implementing a new production cell.
• Reducing defects from a particular process.
• Attacking material flow between a group of processes.
• Implementing waterstrider milk-runs that better match takt time.
• Completing a 5S event in a particular department.
The events listed above clearly require the attention and focus of more than one person. However, they should also result in savings that are far greater than those achieved during the smaller improvements.
Trunk or Boot and Garbage or Rubbish: What’s the difference?
We should mention that over the past twenty years, many U.S. and European companies have developed their own terminology for kaizen. Listed below are some of the most common ones:
• Kaizen Blitz
• Rapid Process Improvement (RPI)
• Accelerated kaizen Event (AKE)
• Kaizen Event
• Kaizen Workshop
• Continuous Improvement Workshop (CIW)
One should not become confused or intimidated by the terminology or acronyms. Each of the terms mean the same thing and in our opinion, a company can use the terminology that they are most comfortable with. As long as the proper TPS techniques are used, we don’t think it matters what things are called.
Senior Managerial Support
No discussion of kaizen, whether the daily or weekly kind, is complete without a work on senior management support. It cannot be overstated that adopting a kaizen mindset must be a priority for managers of all levels. Amongst other things, this includes playing an active role in participating in kaizen activities. This will be especially important in the first few years of a company’s continuous improvement journey.
Final Words
For those who have tried, you will know that completing kaizen is not as simple as it sounds. However, as we often state at Gembutsu, ultimate success will be dependent not upon employees, but on the ability of managers to make continuous improvement a priority and a way of life by conducting workshops and supporting individual improvement ideas. To assist in this implementation, the next article outlines how to conduct a week-long kaizen workshops.
What Do The Brains Mean?
