Kaizen is Japanese word that means continuous improvement, Kaizen is used in business to make processes better. Everyone in the company is involved in continuous improvement. Kaizen is always associated with Kaizen events. Kaizen event is a burst event where you get everyone together to solve a problem. In lean, we don’t solve problems but we counter them by implementing different measures. Manager could replace actual solutions with better ones at any time.
In a Kaizen event, you put a team together during one day to one week, this team will tackle a problem.
- Pre-kaizen: where you want to find the stakeholders, the true problem. You have to go to the gemba or where the problem occurs.You can see the problem in its native environment.
- Kaizen event: provide the team with the required environment and focus on solving the problem and providing solutions. Everybody should be engaged and energized to provide proper solutions and suggestions. Managers in most cases don’t have enough time to allocate to a Kaizen event. But it is better to organise a Kaizen event to get rid of problems that the company faces every day. One of the team members will say it is the best way to solve the problem.
- Post-Kaizen: this step is the key, you have to follow up with the process, if you don’t have leadership strategy, check visual controls, metrics and KPI.
