I have taught TQM for many years as an official subject for MBA
students. During this time, I have also done multiple kaizen projects local and
international with various industries. To name a few: HLL Life
care Limited; Grasim Bhivani Textiles Limited; PT Elegant textiles Indonesia;
TiE-Hubli and many more. The marriage between
Academia and industry has given me a crisp understanding of kaizen. I am hoping
to address things that I find important. Please free to share your views and
opinion, I am happy to engage in a constructive discussion.
What is Kaizen?
According
to Wikipedia kaizen means “change for better”. Kaizen means gradual, marginal,
small, and continuous improvements done in our personal/professional life with
zero or minimum investments to improve the quality of life and quality of work.
When I was conducting a workshop on
kaizen, at Bhivani Textiles Limited, one of the participants asked me what is
the meaning of kaizen from an Indian perspective. I told him kaizen means Pragathi,
and that’s my definition of Kaizen.
Why Kaizen?
To
remain competitive, we need kaizen. Kaizen is a mindset and more of a common sense.
If kaizen becomes way of life, we will be in a virtuous cycle.
Can we do kaizen in real
life?
Kaizen can be done everywhere and by everyone. As a student, you can
practice kaizen in your daily activities. For example, if you want to improve
your fitness, start it today without any procrastination and increase the phase
step by step. If you want to learn a new language learn every word each day and
slowly increase the phase. In industry every person can do kaizen in their work
area to improve their efficiency and effectiveness.
How to measure Kaizen in
an organization?
Kaizen Participation Index (KPI) is a measure of Kaizen. Improve
KPI every year to make kaizen program effective.
In simple words KPI measures “the percentage of employees engaged
in an organization.”
KPI = No. of people participated in kaizen * 100/ Total number of
employee
How to identify Opportunities
for Kaizen?
Kaizen is supposed to be driven by
intrinsic motivation – kaizen tends to be ideas that make our own work easier
or allow us to do a better job for customers. If we want to improve our task
kaizen will just happen. The opportunities to identify in kaizen are:
1. Problem to solution
2.
War on waste
3.
Opposite requirements
4.
Perfection of know
5. Seize the unknown
What are the main
sources of Kaizen?
1.
Customer
surveys
2.
Employee
suggestions
3.
Brainstorming
4.
Benchmarking
5.
Performance
appraisal
Famous companies that
started and engaged in Kaizen
Toyota
Production System is well known for implementing kaizen. Whenever problems were
identified in the work area, it was seen as an opportunity for kaizen. Now
kaizen has become the way of life at Toyota. On an average every employee implements
one kaizen per month.
In India companies such as: Reliance Industries; Zydus
Cadila; ABB Limited; Crompton Greaves; Thermax Limited; ITC Limited and many
more have promoted kaizen.
Real life Kaizen Examples
My friend Vinayak Lokur, CEO of Expert Engineering, has
been kind to share real life Kaizen examples from his organization. Thank you Vinayak. Expert
Engineering is an OEM supplier of Industrial valves for a number of leading
companies in India, Russia, East and South Africa.
Below are 3 real life Kaizen examples with Kaizen worksheets.
Simple Kaizen - as simple as organizing data
Commonsensical Kaizen
Technical Kaizen
Feel free to share your comments and suggestions. As said earlier I would be glad to cover a topic/subject that interests you.
Kaizen through your blog was informative.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I see an industrial perspective with realtime implemention and also a success story of Toyota.
In my view, industries can be dealt with this implementation through seminars to the leadership teams or perhaps, through auditing.
More elaboration over the realtime domestic practices along with the use cases would help!
Thanks for the suggestions. It is clearly mentioned in my article that, Toyota Production System is a success story of Kaizen. Kaizen should become the organisation culture for implementation and measured by Kaizen Participation Index. More about kaizen in my next article.
DeleteThank you for sharing the kaizen idea. As per the examples stated, kaizen can be well implemented in industrial areas. Many of us work in the service industry. How far Kaizen is implemented in these industries! We can observe the performance and better productivity in manufacturing industry through Kaizen, but evaluation of performance and better service is very hard. Please enlighten us in this behalf.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comments. Kaizen is practiced not only in manufacturing but also in service industry. There is a methodology to evaluate Kaizen. Please read my next article on kaizen to learn about Kaizen practices in service industry and methodology for evaluating kaizen.
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