Kaizen and Continuous Improvement
Kaizen is the Japanese word for “change for the better”. As a management practice it means small, continuous improvements made by everyone, instead of rare large projects led by specialists. Masaaki Imai’s 1986 book Kaizen: The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success made the term known worldwide.
How it works
- PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act): the improvement cycle, traced to Shewhart and popularised by Deming. Standardise the result once it is confirmed.
- Everyone takes part: managers build the system; workers raise and test small ideas (suggestion systems, small groups).
- Go and see (gemba): look at the real work before changing it.
- Event form: a kaizen event is a short, focused workshop on one process.
Kaizen and the rest of the cluster
| Approach | Change size | Who leads |
|---|---|---|
| Kaizen | Small, frequent | Front-line teams |
| lean, [[./six-sigma-and-dmaic | six-sigma-and-dmaic]] | Medium, project-based |
| [[./business-process-reengineering | business-process-reengineering]] | Large, radical |
Kaizen is the “perfection” principle of Lean and the Control phase of DMAIC in daily form. In a BPM programme, it is the monitoring loop of the bpm-lifecycle working at team level.
Related
total-quality-management, taiichi-ohno, BPM hub
Open items
- Attribution of PDCA to Deming versus Shewhart varies by source; both are credited in the sources used.
Sources
- Imai, Kaizen: The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success, McGraw-Hill, 1986
- Summary of Imai’s book: https://maaw.info/ArticleSummaries/ArtSumImaiKaizen1986.htm
- Kaizen Institute: https://kaizen.com/