Implementation
The Toyota Production System is known for kaizen, where all line personnel are expected to stop their moving production line in case of any abnormality and, along with their supervisor, suggest an improvement to resolve the abnormality which may initiate a kaizen.
The cycle of kaizen activity can be defined as:
- Standardize an operation and activities.
- Measure the standardized operation (find cycle time and amount of in-process inventory)
- Gauge measurements against requirements
- Innovate to meet requirements and increase productivity
- Standardize the new, improved operations
- Continue cycle ad infinitum
This is also known as the Shewhart cycle, Deming cycle, or PDCA. Other techniques used in conjunction with PDCA include 5 Whys, which is a form of root cause analysis in which the user asks "why" to a problem and finds an answer five successive times. There are normally a series of root causes stemming from one problem, and they can be visualized using fishbone diagrams or tables.
Masaaki Imai made the term famous in his book Kaizen: The Key to Japan's Competitive Success.
Apart from business applications of the method, both Anthony Robbins and Robert Maurer have popularized the kaizen principles into personal development principles. In the book One Small Step Can Change Your life: The Kaizen Way, and CD set The Kaizen Way to Success, Maurer looks at how individuals can take a kaizen approach in both their personal and professional lives.
In the Toyota Way Fieldbook, Liker and Meier discuss the kaizen blitz and kaizen burst (or kaizen event) approaches to continuous improvement. A kaizen blitz, or rapid improvement, is a focused activity on a particular process or activity. The basic concept is to identify and quickly remove waste. Another approach is that of the kaizen burst, a specific kaizen activity on a particular process in the value stream.
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