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Is There a Fundamental Misunderstanding of Kaizen?
January 22, 2014 2:37:00 PM

Is there a fundamental misunderstanding of Kaizen?  

Have you every heard, “Kaizen focuses only upon a small simple change” or “Kaizen only achieves a 20% improvement”? 

The risk that we need to avoid here is looking for the ‘’breakthrough’ in one big step.  Not only is this almost always impossible, but it is dangerous. A new term has recently been added to the lean vocabulary: Kaikaku. While kaizen is a focused incremental change for the best, Kaikaku means making fundamental and radical changes to a production system.

In a Kaikaku “blitz event” the team simultaneously impacts a series of processes across several functional areas, thereby implementing change to many processes at once in a very short time period.  This may be very disruptive to production and virtually impossible to think through all the changes in much detail prior to implementation.  What is the challenge with the Kaikaku?  Attempting to ensure success because you didn’t follow the PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Adjust) cycle, especially the ‘Check-Adjust’!  With all of these simultaneous process changes how can you validate that none are broken?  Were there any real value added changes? 

Don’t get me wrong, there may be times when a full makeover is needed, but I would recommend something along the line of a DMADV event.  DMADV (Define-Measure-Analyze-Design-Verify) is a formal Six Sigma Black Belt event focused on completely redesigning a process to fit your customer’s needs.  The Kaikaku appears to be a DMADV shortcut, which I bet you will be sorry for in the end.

If you still feel you need to accomplish something more significant, try a Kaizen event.  A Kaizen event occurs over a full week and allows for more radical improvements, but the focus is still only to impact a limited process area, such as a production cell.  Start with a trial, in a controlled environment; monitor the results thru the use of a pilot before going live across a broad process area.  The best radical change is one where a solid ‘Plan’ is developed and broken into pieces that can then be ‘Done’ strategically where you can monitor the impact and ensure it is sustainable.