Kaizen: An Introduction

As my girlfriend would no doubt tell you, I always find it easier to learn things by trying to teach them to other people (just ask her about neodymium magnets, how 3D TV works, or pretty much anything to do with PCs if you don’t believe me). So with that in mind, I’ve decided to write a brief post on just one of the things I’ve been researching over the past couple of weeks. Hopefully it’ll be informative and, if possible, entertaining, but I’m not making any promises. At the very least, my girlfriend will be spared the lectures and allowed to fill her brain with things she really cares about, like ‘everything there is to know about Columbo’.

I was recently asked if I knew what Kaizen was. While I recognised the word I wasn’t familiar enough with it to supply a definition, so when I got home later that day I decided to look it up.

The term Kaizen means 'change for the better', and comes from the Japanese kai; meaning change, and zen; meaning good. Kaizen is a form of continuous improvement process. A continuous improvement process, or CIP, is the process of improving a product, service or process through constant repeated iteration. It’s a bit like at home, if you ever cook the same recipe on a regular basis you might find that you make small improvements to it every so often, adding a little salt or trying slightly different vegetables. You might also find that you find ways to cut down on the preparation time by preparing some things while others cook, or saving on washing up by cooking everything in one pan instead of two or three. By tweaking the different variables, you can improve the efficiency of the process(cooking) and the quality of the final product (food). The basic process of CIP is looking at what you’re doing and then identifying, reducing, and removing any action that negatively impacts the product, process, or service. The other key thing to remember is that CIP is about constant tiny steps rather than giant alterations.

Kaizen appears to be a very popular and effective form of continuous improvement process and is recognised as a key factor in the success of many Japanese and American companies, most notably Toyota, who developed their own Toyota Production System (TPS) based on Kaizen. Kaizen and TPS are also related to ‘lean manufacturing’ which basically sees anything that doesn’t add value for the end customer (the person buying the service/finished product) to be a waste. There is so much more detail I could go into, but for the sake of brevity, I'll leave that for future posts.

I love all this because, despite what many people might think about me, I can be a bit of a perfectionist and a pedant. Unfortunately, I can also be quite lazy, and although I never compromise on quality, I’m always looking to find more efficient ways to do things. Without wanting to turn into some kind of OCD robot, I’ve already started to find myself looking at ways I can implement ideas from Kaizen and Lean in my everyday work and home life. I’m walking a fine line now, but I don’t think it’s too ridiculous to move the teabags, kettle, and mugs to the same part of the kitchen, do you? Only time will tell just what effect this has on me but it seems to have worked for others so far, so I’m not worried, just as long as my housemates remember to put the cheese grater back on the shadow board.