Kaizen events are an innovative and unusually effective method for making process improvements quickly. It will be difficult for you to keep up with your competitors if you do not learn to use them successfully in your organization.An auto parts manufacturer used a kaizen event to improve productivity in one plant by 102%, freeing up 65 employees to staff a new plant.
A sheet-metal fabricator used a kaizen event in the office area to cut exceptions (special cases requiring extra work) by 50%, and get parts through receiving and inspection 65% faster.
A large plastics molding company used a kaizen event in their warehouse to improve morale by 78% (as measured by internal surveys).
Kaizen (rhymes with "pie-pen") is a Japanese word meaning "improvement." During a "kaizen event," a cross-functional group of employees focus full-time for three to five days on dramatically improving one process in your organization.
Team members achieve results largely by implementing one or more "lean operating concepts." These include 5S (workplace organization and cleanliness), standard work (development and documentation of a consistent way to get the work done), work cells (collocating all people and equipment necessary to complete a job), one-piece flow (finishing one piece of work before starting another), setup reduction, and preventive maintenance. Most of these techniques work just as well in the office as on the shop floor.
The keys to a successful kaizen event are thorough preparation before the event and great leadership during the event. The most important parts of preparation include defining an "achievable breakthrough" goal for the event, developing training materials to teach the team how to make the improvement, and choosing the team leader and team members. The leader must be able to alternatively drive people forward, deal with conflict, and inspire the team members, in addition to being a terrific trainer and a master of the lean operating concepts I discussed above.
Why should you consider doing kaizen events? Your organization is a collection of processes, including hiring, production, strategic planning, accounting, product development, and more. Your processes are more or less defined and documented, and whether or not you designed them on purpose, they are perfectly designed to get you the results you are getting.
If you keep doing what you've always done, you'll keep getting what you've always got. If you don't like the results you are getting, you have to change the processes that produce those results. If you want better results quickly, you need to change your processes quickly. Kaizen events enable you to change your processes quickly.
Thinking about getting started? Good. Here are my top seven tips for doing it right:
7. Make sure that 70 percent of the people on your kaizen event teams are hourly employees, the people who do the work. They will be executing the redesigned process and in the end they will make it succeed or fail. Furthermore, employees' brains are underutilized in most companies and giving them a chance to use their creative abilities will give you better results and do wonders for morale. Allowing managers and engineers to dominate an event is a great way to fail.
6. Give your kaizen event teams freedom to try ideas with which you don't agree. Trust their common sense and that they have the best interests of your organization in mind. They probably see problems and solutions you don't see. Even if their solution fails, they will have greater respect for you afterward, because you showed your respect for their intellectual and creative abilities. Your people will repay your trust in them next time even if they have break through brick walls to do it.
5. Teach lean operating concepts to participants at the beginning of an event, but do it in less than four hours and stick to concepts they will be able to use during that week. If they don't use what they learn, they'll forget it and you'll have wasted your time and money on excess training.
4. Plan your first kaizen event carefully. Include your most opinionated employees on the team because they will enjoy it and talk it up afterwards. Pick a process that is visible so the results will be obvious. Limit the scope to ensure success.
3. Don't ignore product development, marketing and sales, customer service, or accounting. Kaizen events work just as well in the laboratory or the office as they do on the manufacturing floor, and may give you even better payback.
2. You may eventually develop internal kaizen event leaders, but get help for at least your first five events. There are a lot of ways to do a kaizen event wrong, and you do not want give this powerful approach a bad reputation in your organization by failing the first few times. There is no reason to invent your own kaizen event process from scratch. You can hire people who will teach you a proven kaizen event process and train your leaders. Don't be cheap and cost yourself (literally) millions of dollars in time and lost improvements. If you've been doing kaizen events, don't assume that the process you are currently using is the best way to run your events. Learn about other approaches that may produce better payback and be more enjoyable for the participants.
1. Start now. Learn by doing. One week out on the shop floor will do you more good than five years of sitting around and thinking.
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