Kaizen - The Key to Competitive Success

KAIZEN means ongoing improvement involving everyone - Top management, managers and workers. - Masaaki Imai, Author of Kaizen

Kaizen is a way of thinking about a business as an ever-improving way to serve customers through better products at lower prices. Kaizen means improvement. Kaizen includes many tools and techniques including quality control, quality improvement, PDCA, Kanban and many more.

Kaizen, TQM, Lean and Six Sigma are different names for the same methods and tools. The goal remains the same: faster, better, cheaper products and services to satisfy a more demanding customer.

Principles of Kaizen

  • Putting the customer first
  • Good processes mean good results
  • Build quality into the process
  • Just-in-time delivery of products and services
  • If something is not working Go and See what's going on
  • Manage based on facts and data, not gut feel or trial-and-error
  • Chronic problems are more important than random ones
  • Reduce deviation and waste
  • Standardize the Improvement

Types of Waste to Eliminate using Kaizen

  • People
  • Process
  • Time
  • Machines
  • Materials
  • Facilities
  • Inventory
  • Thinking

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