Masaaki Imai Kaizen Pdf 20

Be careful not to confuse the Kaizen approach with the Kaizen workshop, or kaizen blitz, or kaikaku (reform), which is used for major changes in a production system, a reengineering.

masaaki imai kaizen pdf 20

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The internal factors can be the smallest efforts of all employees individually. These things and their working are taught by Kaizen. If you are searching for an answer to what is kaizen, here we will tell you all that you need to know about what is kaizen and its benefits.

As kaizen tells us that small tasks are very important in the development of any business, employees will know their worth for the development of their company. When their worth will be valued in any way, they will feel encouraged and entitled. This will keep them motivated to work for the betterment of the company.

Co-written by leaders at the Kaizen Institute, Creating a Kaizen Culture explains how to enable an adaptive, excellent, and sustainable organization by leveraging core kaizen values and the behaviors they generate.

This book includes more than 200 photographs, flow diagrams, value stream maps, and tables--and features a case study that illustrates how a company became more competitive by successfully implementing kaizen principles.

The book first outlines the tactical principles for improving the three phases of the changeover procedure. Next you'll learn how to improve changeover on a processing line. All of the ideas presented are based on kaizen improvements that require very little, if any, expenditure. Process razing and the implementation of one-piece flow are also examined as means for eliminating wasteful transportation and searching.

IN A GOOD YEAR, THE U.S. manufacturing sector might chalkup a 4% overallincrease in productivity. At the plant level, some top-flight produc-tion operations have achieved gains of 20% or more in a 12- month period. But you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone with a more impressive productivity story than Dino Clark in Building 102 of AlliedSignal Inc.'s jet-engine manufacturing complex on the south side of Phoenix. Clark, a veteran machinist, is one of six multiskilled production workers who operate a nine-station manufac-turing cell that produces fan discs, a critical jet-engine component featur-ing highly contoured grooves. In the last year, the productivity of that oper-ation has soared by 885%. That's not a misprint. The increase was 885%. "Before," says Clark, "we were lucky to get out one part per day. Now, we're getting 10 out in a day-and we're do-ing it with fewer people." On display near the cell is a "spaghetti chart" depicting the circu-itous 2,686-ft route that parts once traveled through the plant, not includ-ing trips outside the building for special processing. Now, the travel distance is just 667 ft, through a simple loop, and outside processing has been elimi-nated. "We're now doing one-piece flow," Clark says. One result: work in process (WIP) in the cell has been slashed by 89% and cycle time by 79%. What caused the quantum leap in performance? The short answer is kaizen-the Japanese term for continuous-im-provement activity. But that's really only half the answer. In its traditional context, kaizen means making small, incremental improvements over an exItended time period. In recent years, however, a growing number of manu-facturers in the U.S. and around the world have been catching on to a meth-odology that accelerates the kaizen process and produces dramatic results in a week or less. More commonly referred to as "kaizen events" or "kaizen workshops," the ap-proach targets a particular manufacturing cell or other segment of the produc-tion chain. Typically, the participants are a cross-functional team including managers, engineers, support staff, maintenance workers, and production operators-sometimes supplemented by marketing or finance personnel, and even people from outside the company. The team generally spends five days in the target area, studying the process, collecting and analyzing data, dis-cussing improvement options, and im-plementing changes-which may in-volve moving or modifying equipment. The five-day kaizen event (some companies do it in two or three) is a quick-hitting way to get results. Expe-rienced practitioners, however, point out that the job is never really finished. That's why many companies that have adopted kaizen techniques deploy them over and over again-of-ten revisiting the same target area. "The goal of a kaizen breakthrough event is not to create a perfect production line. The goal is simply to create a better production line," says Bill Schwartz, a partner with TBM Consulting Group Inc., a Durham, N.C.-based firm that specializes in helping companies develop kaizen programs. "It unleashes the creativity of a group of people who are empowered to make changes. It gives you 400 or 500 hours of improvement activity focused in one area for a week. And it does accelerate the improvement process." One advantage of squeezing all the activity into a single week, says Anand Sharma, founder and president of TBM Consulting, is that "it doesn't give you the luxury to think of big, expensive solutions. The emphasis is on solutions you can implement quickly. And you get immediate reinforcement by getting results." Because of the compressed time frame, the Assn. for Manufacturing Excellence (AME) has dubbed the technique "kaizen blitz." To popularize the concept, AME has been staging a series of public blitz events during which company outsiders are in- vited to participate as members of kaizen teams. The University of Dayton's Center for Competitive Change and administrators of the Shingo Prize for Excellence in Manufacturing at Utah State University have also sponsored in-plant public kaizen events, as have TBM Consulting and the Kaizen Institute, a consulting network with branches in Europe, Japan, and the U.S. A solution One explanation for the recent surge in interest: Although most manufacturing executives now have a fairly good grasp of the principles of the Toyota Production System-the basic framework of "lean" manufacturing- many have been looking for a way to introduce the concepts into their plants. And that's just what kaizen events originally were designed to do. In his new book, Gemba Kaizen: The Common-Sense Approach to Business Management (1997, McGraw-Hill), Masaaki Imai, founder and chairman of the Kaizen Institute, points out that af-ter Toyota Motor Corp. had developed and implemented just-in-time (JIT) production methods within its own facilities, company executive Taiichi Ohno formed an autonomous study group to spread the practices to the automaker's suppliers. "Each month," Imai notes, "the group visited a gemba [workplace] of a different supplier and conducted gemba kaizen there for three or four days. . . . [This] proved to be such an ef-fective way of spreading Toyota's JIT know-how and practices among its sup-pliers that the primary suppliers soon began involving their second-tier suppli-ers in the activities as well." Robert W. Hall, professor of opera-tions management at Indiana Univer-sity and a long-time AME official, re-calls that Toyota began conducting its kaizen blitzes with suppliers in the early 1970s. "When Toyota did it, it was more like a blitkrieg - total war on waste,"he says. While researching his 1983 book, Zero Inventories, Hall talked to one of the floor leaders at Tokai Rika, a Toyota supplier firm in Japan. "He told me that he went home only three nights during the five-month pe-riod while they were going through it. They went end to end and transformed the entire plant," Hall says. Although today's kaizen events may be some-what less intense, team members often put in 12- to 14-hour days, and maintenance crews are fre-quently on call to work through the night-moving machinery and modifying equipment or electrical drops after other team members have left for the day. But the effort does pay off. With adequate preparation and strong man-agement support, a series of kaizen events can produce a significant transformation. "As a tactical approach, it is an idea whose time has come," asserts Kenneth J. McGuire, president of the Manufacturing Excellence Action Coalition (MEAC), a South Yarmouth, Mass.-based consulting firm. But, he points out, kaizen is more than just a tactical weapon. It is also a set of tools and a basis for building a competitive strat- egy. The kaizen toolbox includes the five Ss of good house-keeping- derived from five Japanese words beginning with the letter "s"-along with standardization of procedures, and elimination of muda, the Japanese term for waste. From a tactical perspective, McGuire stresses, "kaizen deals with breakthrough change, done swiftly, and adher-ing to the principles of the Toyota Production System. . . . And, as a strategy, if your problem is disconnection-batch manufacturing and erratic demand inside your factory- then kaizen may be the perfect prescription." Steady gains Many companies that have embraced the concept would agree. While the 885% productivity leap achieved in the Al-liedSignal fan-disc cell may be an aberration, steady across-the- board gains are common. "At the business-unit level, our productivity goal is a 6% improvement each year-and we've been exceeding that," says Marc Hoffman, vice presi-dent- operations for the firm's Phoenix-based jet-engine business. "At the factory level, it has been much higher. Most of our buildings are getting about a 20% year-to-year productivity improvement." But productivity isn't the only benefit. At AlliedSignal, kaizen events have targeted improvements in quality, leadtime reduction, on-time delivery, and even improved cash flow. The 2,000- employee business unit now stages about 200 kaizen events a year, and occasionally conducts them for supplier firms. Hoffman, who brought in TBM Consulting to help spread the kaizen gospel,