Kaizen: Boost business efficiency through continuous improvement.

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What is Kaizen? Are you curious? Kaizen is a Japanese term that means “continuous improvement” or “change for the better.” In a manufacturing context, Kaizen refers to a philosophy and methodology of making small, incremental improvements in various aspects of the production process. It involves the participation of all employees, from top management to frontline workers, in identifying and implementing improvements in areas such as work efficiency, quality, safety, and effectiveness. This article will explain the benefits of Kaizen. Let’s read this article together!

Table of Contents

1. What is Kaizen in a Factory?

2. Why Kaizen is Crucial for Organizations

3. KAIZEN System: Steps

• Visual Management
• Standardization
• Manualize
• Tool

In today’s world, things are moving faster every day, and competition in business is rapidly increasing. This forces entrepreneurs to find ways to reduce costs while maintaining the same level of efficiency and operational standards within their organizations. The Kaizen system, therefore, plays a very important role. Many business owners in Thailand are choosing to implement this philosophy and methodology, which focuses on continuous improvement in factories. It originated in Japan and is widely used in manufacturing industries worldwide.

Kaizen emphasizes the involvement of all employees in identifying and implementing small, incremental changes to improve processes, eliminate waste, and enhance overall efficiency. It fosters a culture of continuous learning, problem-solving, and teamwork. By adopting Kaizen principles, factories can achieve higher productivity, better quality, reduced costs, and increased employee satisfaction.

Implementing Kaizen requires regular process inspection and analysis, realistic goal setting, employee training and support, and fostering a collaborative and open work environment. It’s a continuous “process” approach aimed at creating a sustainable and constantly improving factory environment. The key factors that make Kaizen popular in improving work efficiency, adopted by many organizations worldwide, consist of the following four main factors:

1. Creating and Sustaining a Positive Mindset: Continuously cultivate and support a good mindset among employees at “all levels”. This requires support and presentation of Kaizen concepts from the organization’s top management. Building a strong mindset helps the organization become more resilient and capable of continuous development.
2. Increasing Efficiency: Enhance “efficiency” in every work process through regular monitoring and improvement. The aim is to continuously improve operational effectiveness.
3. Raising Standards: Help elevate the “standards” of work processes.
4. Reducing Resource Consumption: Minimize the use of resources, including time, labor, and tangible resources. By reviewing and refining internal processes, unnecessary resource consumption is effectively reduced. This leads to lower costs and strengthens the sustainability of the organization’s operations.

The Japanese Kaizen system has several steps, following a concept widely used in Japan. Japanese organizations identify these steps to promote continuous improvement. There are 4 main steps as follows:

It is a continuous improvement method focused on enhancing visual communication and information sharing within an organization. It involves using visual aids such as charts, graphs, signs, and color-coding systems to improve production efficiency, effectiveness, and overall performance. By utilizing “Visual Management,” teams can better understand and track processes, and make informed decisions to optimize workflows. This method promotes transparency, standardization, and collaboration, ultimately leading to improved operational efficiency.

Once we have a clear understanding of the current situation and have identified areas for improvement, the next step in KAIZEN is to enhance the process or form of that element in a way that yields better results. This involves creating a new process standard (Standardization). This step encompasses the creation of standards for both efficiency and effectiveness of work, to achieve quality outputs and resource utilization.

2.1 Work Efficiency: This refers to the ability to complete work or operations with quality and within an appropriate timeframe. Eliminating unnecessary processes helps reduce costs, improve quality, minimize waste, and increase productivity, leading to more efficient revenue generation for the organization or individual.

2.2 Quality of Output: This is one of the core concepts in applying Kaizen for improvement and development within an organization. It refers to the ability of a product or service to meet standards or customer needs, exhibiting good quality and effective functionality. High-quality output is crucial as it impacts customer satisfaction, confidence in the product or service, and builds a continuously loyal customer base.

2.3 Resources: Beyond improved operational procedures and output quality, efficient resource reduction is a vital part of Kaizen improvement. It helps organizations operate more intelligently and cost-effectively in all aspects of business and operations. This has long-term benefits for the organization in terms of resources like time, money, and personnel.

Creating Kaizen manuals is the process of developing standardized documents or guides to communicate information and work processes within an organization. This is an effective way to standardize and improve understanding of work processes at all levels of the organization. It allows valuable knowledge and experience of individuals or the organization to be easily accessed and utilized. Creating manuals to convey new standards helps make internal processes systematic, efficient, clear, and more organized.

Furthermore, if an organization doesn’t properly collect ideas or establish new standards—for example, if information isn’t documented and stored in a system—it’s likely that over time, new ideas or standards that were once conceived will disappear and be forgotten. Decades later, the manuals created may no longer be available. The ideas passed down from the very beginning, when Kaizen was first implemented, might be lost, which would be a great shame.

If manuals were to disappear due to employees retiring or resigning, without any hand-off to subsequent personnel, that is not good. Therefore, when new ideas emerge, it’s crucial to meticulously store the created manuals as documents or within the organization’s system. This is the best way to communicate the organization’s standards to all employees so that they can effectively understand their roles within Kaizen, without having to waste time rebuilding those standards from scratch.

Using efficient tools is a crucial part of any process, helping organizations work effectively and increase productivity. Here are some examples of powerful tools that can be used to implement Kaizen for continuous improvement:

If steps 1 through 3 have been completed without effective tools, achieving Kaizen, or implementing new ideas to improve organizational efficiency, will likely be very difficult. Choosing tools that comprehensively cover the entire Kaizen process is also not a simple task. To ensure the most cost-effective workflow, a detailed approach is required for this step.

Kaizen, through the selection of efficient tools, is one of the most important steps. It can be viewed from two perspectives:

4.1 Maintaining the New Work Standard

Having ideas and a team that shares knowledge allows for the identification of weaknesses and gaps in the organization’s standards. This collaborative effort leads to the creation of new, improved workflows that reduce work time and resource consumption while maintaining process efficiency. However, there is no value if the organization fails to preserve these ideas for future use and study. Without preservation, these efforts will be wasted and fade away over time.

The best approach currently is to “create work manuals” to store these ideas. Ideally, these manuals should be regularly updated with new ideas. Even the most brilliant manual is useless if it’s difficult for employees to understand. If the manual is hard to grasp, employees will likely leave it untouched, gathering dust, and never open it a second time.

In the context of “guidance manuals,” effective tools today are no longer just about easily understood text. These manuals are being “Kaizened” (continuously improved) and transformed into digital information, delivered via the cloud. They become fully functional online manuals, allowing for immediate editing of images, animations, audio, and text. Users can easily access them anytime, anywhere.

4.2 Tools for Increasing Work Efficiency

“Give me a place on which to stand, and I will move the earth.”

This quote is from the famous mathematician and scientist Archimedes. He used it to describe the principle of using a small object to perform work on a large object. For example, the Earth is like a massive object constantly rotating around us, possessing significant moving mass. We stand on solid ground. To better understand this quote, consider the simple principle of using a lever.

For example, in a factory Kaizen context, using a simple tool like a “lever” – just a piece of wood and a suitable fulcrum – can greatly reduce human effort. This ability to create tools to augment our strength is what makes humans unique and more advanced than other species. Similarly, in the world of organizational management, Kaizen becomes easier with the right tools. A company Kaizen example is replacing a punch-card time clock with a fingerprint scanner. This not only eliminates paper usage permanently but also provides more accurate employee attendance data, which can then be further analyzed.

Other simple Kaizen ideas include reducing redundant paperwork or reports that ultimately go to the same manager, and prioritizing the order of raw materials used in production to minimize losses from expired materials.

If you are implementing Kaizen to solve a specific problem, the first step is to look back at the root cause of the problem. The employees responsible for or involved in that area will best understand the problem and how to fix or improve it.

This emphasizes the concept of leveraging skills and techniques when a stable foundation is available to support difficult or large-scale tasks. This idea inspires scientists and engineers to create powerful tools and technologies to make work easier and more efficient in everyday life and in the industrial sector.

คานงัด นับว่าเป็นหนึ่งใน อุปกรณ์เครื่องมือ ไคเซ็น (KAIZEN) ทุ่นแรงของมนุษย์ อีกหนึ่งชนิดบนโลก

แนวคิดสู่ความสำเร็จเป็นแนวคิด และปฏิบัติทางวิศวกรรมที่มีต้นกำเนิดจากญี่ปุ่น และมีความสำคัญในการทำให้องค์กรเจริญเติบโต และประสบความสำเร็จในระยะยาว แนวคิด ไคเซ็น มุ่งเน้นการปรับปรุงต่อเนื่อง ความร่วมมือ และการใช้ทรัพยากรที่มีอยู่อย่างมีประสิทธิภาพ นี่คือเหตุผลที่ว่าทำไม Kaizen นักธุรกิจในหลายๆ ประเทศยกให้เป็นอีกหนึ่งในแนวคิดที่ส่งผลดีไปสู่ความสำเร็จ