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The Gift That Keeps on Giving: KAIZEN

Pam Vecellio • Dec 28, 2017

Are you shopping for the ultimate gift to buy this season? How about a gift that keeps on giving throughout the year? A gift that has benefits for you personally, professionally, and your organization.

How about Kaizen?

A Kaizen event is a team-based approach to problem solving that flows through all phases of the improvement cycle effectively and rapidly. Before the event, a Kaizen-appropriate problem is identified along with goals in areas such as customer satisfaction, cycle time and labor reduction, and error elimination. The team is then mobilized, and a Kaizen event begins. A typical event uses a systematic process to identify waste in the targeted work process, understand and analyze the root causes, identify and test solutions, extract learning, install improvements, and create a system for ongoing improvement. As the event progresses, numerous improvement and change management methods and techniques are applied. All this work is accomplished in a brief period, typically 5 days, with full benefits achieved within 1-3 months.  

A KAIZEN PACKAGE includes: 6 ½ weeks of active training and help in co-leading 1 Kaizen event (on-site) to solve a significant work process problem and achieve rapid benefits.

What you get:

  • Training and co-application of one Kaizen
  • Expect per Kaizen (typical): >$50K savings/year; significant increases in work process efficiency or effectiveness (results greater than historical norms and more than what is believed possible)
  • Development of in-house knowledge, skills, and abilities to personally help teams solve problems
  • Energy, excitement, ownership, and pride in improving work processes and environment

On-going benefits with more Kaizen events : Ability to continually, confidently, and independently lead teams through the Kaizen event process.

  • More results at a greater rate (rollout solutions in hours/days/weeks not months/years)
  • Increases capacity to perform other duties
  • Use of data and measures to understand performance
  • Demonstrate a CAN-DO change culture
  • Innovate and respond to change in shorter periods of time
  • Timely decision making
  • Team member involvement & excitement for additional improvement
After receiving this gift: 1 Kaizen event leader led 12 Kaizen events the following 12 months

A Gift That Keeps Giving…

More Kaizen events create more benefits! In addition, techniques learned within Kaizen training can be used broadly throughout the organization to create additional improvement, such as the following:

  • Set up team continual improvement systems – engage team members by aligning and focusing on daily measurable goals, sharing what’s hindering progress, working through issues together, and sharing/implementing successes
  • Map out processes to identify specific improvement areas
  • Use data to get insight into problem solving
  • Introduce waste & value concepts to openly identify and work to eliminate wastes
  • Take more Gemba walks – get more data and understanding of where time-consuming waste, and frustration exist and how work is really done
  • Create and use goal statements for meetings, annual goals, communicating, training
  • Use Working with Others communication techniques to improve team performance; teach your team WWO
  • Use prioritization techniques for daily activities and decisions (for you and others)
  • Stop problems from happening again and again; help individuals and teams get to the root causes of problems
  • Help individuals identify better root causes and solutions
  • Use the change management process and techniques to help others become comfortable living/working in a new way (improve every day, everywhere)
  • When teaching others remember the value of tell, show, do, and recycle feedback approach to increase understanding of the what, why, and knowledge retention
  • Use SRLD to capture learnings and directions – at the end of the year, end of training, end of activity

Interested in learning more:

Kaizen Skills Training
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