Kaizen – Business Growth And Development

More than a management principle, Kaizen is actually a philosophy and assumes that every aspect of our life deserves to be constantly improved and the Kaizen philosophy lies behind many Japanese management concepts such as Total Quality Control, Quality Control circles, LEAN Manufacturing, small group activities, and paternalistic labour relations.Japanese companies distinguish between innovation (radical) and Kaizen (continuous). Kaizen means literally: change (kai) to become good (zen).

Key elements of Kaizen are:

• quality
• effort
• willingness to change, and
• communication.

The foundation of the Kaizen model consists of 5 founding elements:

1. teamwork
2. personal discipline
3. improved morale
4. quality circles, and
5. suggestions for improvement.

Out of this foundation three key factors in Kaizen arise:

1. Elimination of waste and inefficiency
2. the Kaizen five-S framework for good housekeeping
   • Seiri – tidiness
   • Seiton – orderliness
   • Seiso – cleanliness
   • Seiketsu – standardized clean-up
   • Shitsuke – discipline
3. Standardization.

When Do You Apply the Kaizen philosophy?

Kaizen often fits well in incremental change situations that require long-term change, and in collective cultures.

More individual cultures that are more focused on short-term success are often more conducive to concepts such as Business Process Reengineering (BPR).

BPR is ‘the fundamental reconsideration and radical redesign of organizational processes, in order to achieve drastic improvement of current performance in cost, service and speed’. Value creation for the customer is the leading factor for BPR and information technology often plays an important enabling role.¹

When Kaizen is compared to BPR is it clear the Kaizen philosophy is more people-oriented, is easier to implement, and requires long-term discipline. BPR, on the other hand is harder, technology-oriented, enables radical change but requires major change management skills.

ProfiTune and Kaizen

You might like to think of ProfiTuning as a very Kaizen-type of approach to business improvement, since it focuses on the leveraged effect produced by a few small changes applied to the critical inputs of a business to produce a disproportionate improvement in profits (and other desired outcomes).

¹Hammer and Champy