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Kaizen: What Is It?

Kaizen is the Japanese term for “Improvement” and is most often referred to as continuous improvement in English terms.  It applies to a few areas of Lean, such as:

Every Person, Every Day Kaizen

Kaizen every day means Increasing the capability of our team-mates so they are trained to discover and define problems in our process, allowing us to fix them quickly (then work towards putting a long term fix in place).

Kaizen Bursts

Noted on a Value Stream Map, these are ideas for solutions or additional challenges called out during the value stream mapping process, that we note especially.  Noting Kaizen burst ideas ensures we don’t forget these things later on.

Kaizen Events

A Kaizen event is usually a three to five day event that involves team-mates from the front line process and a handful of people unrelated to a process.

We often go through the full Lean transformation during the event, mapping out a process with queues and rework noted, calling out any wastes, performing fishbone analysis or the 5 whys to get to the root cause of problems, using a Pareto Chart to show us where to start, line balancing to balance the flow, and finally putting it all together in a “Future State” value Stream Map that shows a new process and the potential time and dollar savings.

Some companies prefer to hold mini Kaizen events, where team-mates go through the process more quickly (often within one day) or perform different analysis over multiple meetings.

By David McLachlan

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