Ready – Set – Kaizen Blog!

Starting Monday a group of us will be writing a series of articles, Project Kaizen, on how to make Kaizen activities for groups more effective for both individual workers and for the company's overall success. 

Other bloggers participating are:

    Bill Waddell at Evolving Excellence

    Chuck Frey at Innovation Weblog

    Hal Macomber at Reforming Project Management

    Joe Ely at Learning about Lean

    John Miller at  Panta Rei

    Mark Graban at Lean Manufacturing Blog

I will write a little about how to conduct effective meetings; then I will write about CEDAC a great group problem solving tool; standardized work – Toyota’s powerful improvement process; review the Kaizen Blitz process, and “The Missing Link,” Quick and Easy Kaizen. Kaizen means continuous improvement. It also implies that every worker is involved and empowered to fully participate in continuous improvement activities – it means that every worker is recognized that they have important creative ideas to make their work easier, more interesting and to build their skills and capabilities. It also recognizes that as people participate in problem solving activities that the beneficial result to their organization will be reduced costs, improved quality, improved safety, better throughput and better customer service. The heart of successful Kaizen activities is to encourage all workers to make small improvements in their daily work, in fact, the smaller the better. Yes, getting all workers to participate in problem solving activities on a daily basis makes work fun and your company eventual leaders. Instead of avoiding problems we create a problem finding “no blame” environment.

 Management is always looking for big ideas. The average worker has hundreds of opportunities to make small improvement contributions but these are often overlooked by managers as they don’t separately appear to be significant. And this is true, the small ideas by themselves are normally not that significant, but the accumulation of these small ideas from all workers can be very powerful.

The Kaizen Blitz is also a very powerful tool being used by thousands of companies today. The name Kaizen Blitz is really a misnomer, for Kaizen is small ideas and the Blitz is looking for big changes. Kaizen Blitz is really a Kaikaku – a revolution, a radical change. Kaizen Blitz is great but it doesn’t involve all employees on a continuous basis. It makes the company look better and these Blitzes should be done but it doesn’t really add to the self-worth of every worker as small Kaizen activities do.

On Monday please do visit all of our sites. 

Norman Bodek

Blog - http://kaikaku.typepad.com/

Web - http://pcspress.com

Email - bodek@pcspress.com