Kaizen process: 5 steps for radical transformations in your business

What is the definition of Kaizen?

Kaizen is a structured, continual process for improving products, services and systems.

Expect Kaizen to touch every step of the production process, from equipment to methods, and from materials to people.

Kaizen takes an organization-wide approach. You’ll need to have all hands on deck, with every person in your company taking a role in the changes, from the owners and managers to employees and contractors.

One Kaizen principle holds that one small change in one single area can have a large, lasting impact on operational efficiency or customer satisfaction.

The Kaizen philosophy

Kaizen was developed by Japanese organizational theorist Masaaki Imai in 1986, its origins traced back to American business experts involved in the post-WWII rebuilding of Japan. It was adapted for Toyota as part of its legendary system of operational efficiency, known as the “Toyota Way.”

Kaizen means “change for the better” or “continuous improvement” in Japanese. It brings together teams from across the business to break paradigms and completely rethink processes, all in a highly compressed timeframe.

Kaizen incorporates change management, a structured approach that allows a company to adapt to and capitalize on new business realities. It improves employee engagement,  where employees feel supported and recognized so they can focus on mastering their role and/or acquiring new competencies. It also incorporates cross-functional collaboration, where individuals from different departments or with diverse expertise work together to improve innovation and efficiency.

What is the Kaizen strategy?

Kaizen can be used to rapidly and dramatically transform complex processes involving multiple departments. A typical “Kaizen blitz” may span as little as several days or a week of intense brainstorming, followed by a few weeks to implement solutions.

Choquette cautions that Kaizen isn’t meant to take the place of routine continuous improvement. That would be the small daily changes made to increase efficiency and solve problems.

“Continuous improvement is extremely important, but there’s a limit to how much you can improve doing those little baby steps,” Choquette says. “Sometimes you need to entirely reconsider what you do.”

Kaizen can also be applied when no obvious issues exist. “There’s a saying: If you have no problem, that’s a very big problem,” Choquette says. “Things can always be improved. Once you’ve met a target, you should change the target and make it tougher.”

What does Kaizen mean?

Why is Kaizen important?

Kaizen manages to do the following:

• encourages input at any time from any of your employees, whether they work in the factory or the C-suite
• helps your company processes increase efficiency and reduce waste
• gets staff comfortable with all the changes taking place

How Kaizen can improve productivity

Kaizen gets employees involved in the process of continuous improvement. It gives them a sense of ownership and responsibility. That can lead to increased motivation and job satisfaction. It also helps identify and eliminate waste, improving efficiency and reducing costs. Kaizen also encourages a culture of innovation and experimentation, which can lead to new ideas and better ways of doing things.

You can make Kaizen part of your value stream mapping. That’s a process that maps the entire set of actions required to design, create and deliver a product or service to a customer, starting from an initial idea and ending with the customer receiving value.

A step-by-step Kaizen plan

Below are five steps to follow when implementing Kaizen:

1. Clarify the mandate

To achieve buy-in, your company’s leadership needs to create an inclusive team. The group should represent and reflect all areas of the business. And the group should have a clear mandate to improve a process.

The mandate should:

• explain what the problem is and why it’s a problem
• provide supporting data
• set a target for improvement

For example, say your employees spend a lot of time walking to the printer to get documents. Could you make eliminating the printing of documents as your target?

“With continuous improvement, you might move the printer closer to employees to reduce waste, and this could be an incremental improvement-type solution,” Choquette says. “The Kaizen approach is to ask, ‘How can I completely remove the need for printing?’”

An unclear mandate is the most common reason for Kaizen exercises failing. “You need to make sure that participants’ time is well invested,” Choquette says. “Ambiguous expectations or focus are sure to doom the process.”

A facilitator should be chosen who can encourage free-ranging, out-of-the-box discussion and creative ideas about how to disrupt paradigms. “A good facilitator is going to be a mentor and will never resort to telling the Kaizen team, ‘This is what you need to do,’” Choquette says. “Instead, they should give the team carte blanche to create a new process to meet the mandate.”

2. Understand the current process

The next step is to thoroughly understand the current process, including what makes it flawed. “Build a consensus on where the process is failing and the key things that need to change in the new process,” Choquette says.

This step should draw heavily on the three pillars of lean thinking:

Go and see

Observe first-hand how work is actually done in your plant or office. This act of physically walking the facility is called a Gemba walk. The goal is to identify the eight types of waste—effort that adds costs without adding value for customers.

“There should be a lot of Aha! moments ,” Choquette says of people realizing  how little is required to do the job. “A good facilitator is going to use the Kaizen process to show all the waste and demonstrate to the team that there's a need for significant change.”

Ask why

Why are processes or tasks done the way they’re done? That’s a question for your employees. You may also need to do root cause analysis to determine underlying reasons for challenges. There is also a Pareto analysis, which helps you decide which problem areas to focus. That can maximize the impacts of your improvement efforts.

Involve your team

Your employees will feel respected when they’re involved in reflections, planned changes and implementation. This helps ensure buy-in and creates a cultural shift in your team. Your goal? For the team to come to see how these changes will add value.

3. Create the new standard process

Now the team is ready to design a new process to radically improve efficiency. “It should be along the lines of: ‘It takes us three weeks to do this; we want to be able to do it in 72 hours. And let’s even think about how we can do it in 20 minutes,’” Choquette says.

“They’re all going to say, ‘That’s totally crazy. We can’t do that. If you want us to do this, here’s what we would need.’ Aha! now they’re starting to break paradigms.”

Choquette says the new process should follow seven principles that are part of the “Toyota Way.”

The Toyota Way’s 7 principles

1. Continuous flow: Businesses should aim for a continuous, efficient flow of activities, material and information.
2. Pull: Match production levels to customer demand.
3. Load balancing: Level out workload between resources.
4. Focus on quality: Foster a quality-focused culture by prioritizing quality management and problem-solving.
5. Standardize tasks: Adopt and document repeatable methods and encourage continual improvement of standards.
6. Use visual controls: Make vital information easy to see and understand with simple visual cues.
7. Implement proven technology: Use reliable, tested technology that supports your employees, the above principles and lean thinking.

Kaizen vs. traditional process improvement

4. Create an action plan

The Kaizen team is now ready to create an action plan to implement the new process. The plan should include a list of initiatives, who is responsible for each one, a timeline and key performance indicators (KPIs).

KPIs should be included for both the implementation process and the targeted results.

For example, an action step may be to digitize invoices. That would eliminate the need for printing and mailing invoices.

Process metrics could include milestones such as researching software options, buying the software, implementing it and training employees. 

Result metrics could include invoice processing time and cost, erroneous payment rates and invoice exception rates.

5. Implement action items

Plan to implement initiatives quickly. Aim for weeks, if not days. Don’t drag it out for more than three months. “Implementation should be a blitz or it loses its flavour,” Choquette says. Team buy-in is especially critical in phase five. It ensures smooth and rapid implementation.

In fact, there is a concept called the Kaizen blitz, also known as a Kaizen event or rapid improvement event. It’s a short, intense improvement initiative designed to achieve specific, significant process improvements.

Implementation can include trials to test ideas, see what works and make low-cost mistakes for the sake of learning. It’s vital to recognize that some steps will inevitably fail and that your team has permission to fail as they learn.

“It’ll never be perfect from the get-go,” Choquette says. “Teams need to be allowed to fail because that is part of the process. That’s how we learn.”

What is the difference between Kaizen and lean manufacturing?

Kaizen and lean manufacturing are two different concepts that share some similarities.

Kaizen is a continuous process that focuses on making small, incremental changes to improve processes and systems.

Lean manufacturing aims, in the short term, to eliminate waste and improve efficiency.

Kaizen is more of a bottom-up approach that encourages employees to identify areas for improvement and make changes to their work processes.

Lean manufacturing is a top-down approach that focuses on identifying and eliminating waste in all aspects of the business, including production, supply chain and administration.

What is the difference between Kaizen and Kaizen blitz?

Kaizen is a continuous, ongoing improvement, while a Kaizen blitz is a rapid, focused event. A blitz concentrates resources and teams to achieve immediate, significant improvements on a single issue, contrasting with the broader, long-term general Kaizen.

Concepts similar to Kaizen: Six Sigma and PDCA

Six Sigma

Developed by Motorola in the 1980s, Six Sigma uses statistical analysis and a structured DMAIC framework (define, measure, analyze, improve, control) to achieve near-perfect quality. Its goal is to have fewer than 3.4 defects per million opportunities.

The program is called Six Sigma because it applies six core steps to every business problem.

Define—Know which problem needs to be solved and set a clear goal.

Measure—Collect data on the problem.

Analyze—Propose possible solutions to the problem based on the data gathered.

Approve—Make sure everyone involved understands and accepts the solution.

Implement—Put the solution into place.

Control—Make sure the results of the solution can be measured accurately.

PDCA

Developed by Dr. William Edwards Deming, PDCA (plan, do, check, act) guides organizations in identifying problems, developing solutions, implementing those solutions and then analyzing the results to implement further refinements. Each step builds on the previous one, creating a continuous loop for ongoing optimization of products and processes.

Plan

This initial stage determines the goals for a product or process and identifies the necessary changes required to achieve these goals. It is here that problems are defined, analyzed, and prioritized. The collection and analysis of relevant data are crucial to planning effectively.

Do

This phase involves executing the planned actions on a small scale and applying the proposed solution or change.

Check

This third step involves evaluating the results of the implemented changes. Expected results are compared with actual results to assess performance and see if objectives were achieved.

Act

The final stage is about learning from the checking phase and acting accordingly. If the checking phase reveals that the changes were successful, they are then standardized and stabilized. If they’re not, the cycle begins again with further planning.

Next steps

Download our free guide on operational efficiency to learn more about continuous improvement methods to boost your company’s productivity, and see our series of articles in our operational efficiency hub.

Look at uncovering and eliminating inefficiencies in your business to boost productivity, performance and profits by downloading the free BDC guide, Optimize Your Business Processes.

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