Kaizen 101: Simple, Effective Improvement

Day in and day out, companies and organisations all over the world see their employees come in and see them go out. Customer orders arrive and goods despatch. Invoices go out and payments come in. And most of this happens – most of the time. Does it warm your heart or does it feel a bit of a drudge?

Across the road employees arrive early, fired up and ready to start. Keen to make certain that each customer order goes out on time, in full and with perfect quality. If there are any problems they are empowered to stop the process and work with their colleagues to identify and fix the issues. Customers get what they want, when they want it. Prices are competitive, cycle times are short. Customers are delighted, managers lead, employees are happy and engaged!

What’s the difference? Well it’s difficult to tell at first glance because the difference is made up of a number of small differences with everyone in that company focused on continuous improvement, never being at peace with the status quo, constantly striving for excellence and doing their best. This ensures that day in and day out that company will perform at its best for its customers, employees and stakeholders.

Want to find out more?

So Why Become a Kaizen Company?

Well, if the vision above isn’t enough for you already, then here are another few good reasons:
Kaizen is a simple and effective improvement approach. You don’t need months and months of preparation to implement it. But you do need to be fully engaged as leaders.

The Kaizen philosophy and methods have been established for decades with significant impacts in organisations both large and small. It is an underlying principle of Lean techniques which have boosted Toyota to the world’s number one car maker, it has been used in small service companies to reduce repair cycle times by over 60%, it has been used to reduce employee accidents to zero.
Kaizen tools and principles can be applied in any work environment. Their application is equally applicable to a call centre as they are to a production line, as they are to a sales team, as they are to a board of directors, as they are to your home office, as they are to your own life and family!

Kai-Zen Defined

Kaizen is both a definition and a philosophy. Literally translated from the Japanese:

Kai = Change

Zen = Good

Kai + Zen = Good change, generally interpreted as “improvement”

And because the premise is that this is a never-ending pursuit then we get the phrase “continuous improvement”.

So Kaizen continuous improvement efforts take place daily in organisations committed to the Kaizen philosophy. It’s their way of life!

Kaizen achieves the results that some other improvement programmes don’t because they are completely inclusive, involving employees at every level of a company. It could be the members of a production cell, the triage team from a helpdesk, it could be a territory sales team, it could even be the board of directors or any combination of all of these working together. The concept is that everyone has the opportunity to express their views on the work that affects them and are involved in identifying, testing and implementing the improvements.

“Gemba” is another useful Japanese term to remember. It means “the actual place”. So when problems or issues arise, you don’t find the team moving into a conference room with slides, PowerPoint and audio conferencing facilities on the other side of the building. No. They get involved in analysing and resolving the issues where they actually take place – around the screen of the computer throwing a wobbly, at the order entry desk, in front of the goods in dock and so on.

And the aim of all this? Well it isn’t just for the sake of doing it. The ultimate aim is always to keep the customer and their needs in mind. Everything that’s done will ultimately improve the product or service whilst making the lives of the employees more fulfilling by involving them and improving the organisations systems and processes.

So what’s my definition of Kaizen?

“A customer-focused improvement methodology involving all levels of the organisation to continuously improve real issues when and where they happen”.

Simple Methods

There are so many fantastic quality tools and methods out there, but so often we over complicate and overburden ourselves and our companies with too many of them. We settle on a set of key tools and expect them to be applied warts-and-all to issues that just don’t warrant that amount of detailed analysis or length of time. Kaizen is a nutcracker approach to cracking nuts – not a sledgehammer for all seasons. This aligns very much with my own philosophy of right tool – right place making sure that you apply what is necessary and required in order to improve.

So back to how we do this. Now brace yourself, there now follows an exhaustive list of the three essential methods used to achieve a Kaizen breakthrough. Yes, I said three! They are:

• 5S
• Elimination of Waste
• Visual Management

And I’ll tell you a little more about each below.

5S

5S is just that. Five words all beginning with the letter “S” which when put together as a systematic and disciplined approach will immediately start to bring benefits to what you do:

Sift: Go through the workplace and get rid of all the unnecessary things that are lying around and seldom if ever used. End up with just the right tools and materials to do the job. Get rid of the things that have been kept for the last 3 years “just in case”, shred the paper that has been sat in your recycling pile for the last 6 months, throw away the magazines that you said you would always read but never have and so on. The first stage is just one big clean up and declutter!

Sort: Now go through what’s left. How often do you need that stapler? Who really needs access to that manual? Could we share thatprinter? Things that you need frequently to do the job should be at hand. Those needed every so often could be in a drawer or cabinet. Items needed just time to time and perhaps by others could be in a central storage location somewhere else. The idea here is to categorise use and to organise storage – applying general rules for all to follow.

Shine: When you only ever put your precious car through an automatic car wash, how do you ever notice that the tyres are wearing, or that the bumper is loose, or that a new spot of rust has appeared on the wheel arch? “Cleaning is checking”. If like me you handwash your car you will be amazed at all the minor things you notice about your car. And so it is no different in the Kaizen organisation. Cleaning is a regular and individual activity – and I’m not talking about general facility maintenance – I’m talking about your immediate work area whether that is a desk with a computer and telephone or a maintenance bay at the local garage and your toolbox. When you adopt a regular (daily) routine for even just 5 minutes per day you begin to notice that the printer is starting to run low on paper, when your calculator is missing, when that important customer order has fallen down the back of your PC!

Standardise: I’m not advocating zero tolerance to appropriate workspace personalisation such as family photos or certificates of achievement. But if there was a common desk layout with a standard set of tools (read this also as equipment) and you had to swap desk for the day or work in another bay then nobody would have to learn new software, a new telephone system, a new way of operating that piece of machinery and so on. Standardisation is a word that individuals love to hate because they believe a sub-agenda to turn us into clones and automatons! So spend time with your teams, getting them to see the benefits of common layouts, desk equipment, procedures etc and you will be surprised at the spin off benefits such as sense of pride, improved housekeeping and the evolution of a “showcase workplace”.

Sustain: Like anything in life, if you start well but finish poorly then none of the good achieved in the first 4 S’s will continue. I recently met with a company who compared photos of the workplace from before their Kaizen deployment 5 years ago with the photos of just after their “Kaizen Blitz” (see later) and then photos of the same area last week. Sadly, the “before” photo looked even better than the “today” photo. Money had been wasted training people and making changes only to let it all the improvements quickly disappear because the company and its leaders were not really committed to maintaining the 5S way.

Elimination of Waste

How many times a day or week do you have to check something for the sake of checking it, even though you are certain there will be nothing wrong in the document but you still have to tick that box? How many more times today will you have to walk half way across the building to pick up your printouts? Why do you always have to ask the customer for his account number when he already had to enter his telephone number as he entered the call handling system?

We get so used to doing things this way or that way just because that’s how we do things round here. Well NO MORE! If you want to live the Kaizen way all that has to change and we need some serious elimination of waste and non-value added tasks.

What do I mean by non-value added? Well, it’s probably easier to firstly define what a value added activity is. This is generally accepted in as “the customer recognises the value and is willing to pay for it”. Surrounding this is the concept that tasks and work change the product towards something that the customer expects.

So is time spent helping the customer to chose which options best suit his needs value added or non-value added? Is having the customer on the line for 40 minutes, handing her off three times to other agents and then still deciding that you will have to call her back value added or non-value added? I think you get the idea.

So back to waste and there are 7 deadly sins of waste to be eliminated:

• Waste of overproduction. Put simply, making or doing things that are not required by customers now.
• Waste of waiting time. Just hanging around waiting for that report or data to arrive so that you can get on with your work.
• Transportation waste. This refers to physical items and data. For example sending the forms that arrive in Southampton up to Manchester for processing.
• Processing waste. Having to spend 30 minutes processing a loan application when it could (with minor process flow changes) be completed in under 10 minutes.
• Inventory waste. Having too many of the wrong thing in stock and not enough of the right things.
• Waste of movement. This refers to the physical movement of people because of poor layout of the office, having to always go upstairs to visit important co-workers and so on.
• Waste of producing defects. Just the time and effort wasted producing the “things” that you make incorrectly – reports, quotations, order entry, system installations etc. – instead of “right first time”.

These are just a few examples of the different categories of waste but look around. I bet you can see some of these things going on right now in your team, office, factory or call centre. How would it be for you, your employees and most importantly your customers if you took action now to eliminate these drains on your most valuable assets!

So now onto the final essential.

Visual Control

Why do we have brake lights on our cars? Why do we have clocks? Why does your oven have that little red light that comes on when it is up to temperature? What does that “Police Line Do Not Cross” tape mean? These are all visual control mechanisms, giving you information at a glance. And that is the third essential element of Kaizen. It doesn’t have to be complicated – in fact the simpler, the better – but it is all about telling you or others the status of something without the need for words.

Think about what you need to communicate in your work place. What essential information is required and where? Think about the how and also the how often (it needs to be updated that is). Make sure somebody knows who is responsible for upkeep of the information (for example if it is a progress chart of some kind).

Other examples of visual control will quickly come to mind but think of how and where else you could apply visual control in your situation. Workshops may use shadow boards to readily identify when tools are missing, some copiers have a little moving arrow on the paper trays (even in today’s world of electronic monitoring) to show how much paper is left, I even know of a software lab that reports code test status through a real set of traffic lights! Be creative, but stay relevant and keep things simple.
Visual control is a powerful and integral element of Kaizen. It links directly to the last 2 S’s so that people know how information is communicated and what it means in sustaining the gains.

Beyond Kaizen 101

5S, elimination of waste and visual control are Kaizen essentials and you may already have greater knowledge of Lean or Six Sigma methodologies. Kaizen is interwoven especially into the Lean methods but you will be amazed at what can be achieved through application of just these three simple sets of tools and approaches!
We can run your Kaizen blitz to get things up and running. We can teach you more about Lean and Six Sigma if you wish. Just email or call us.

So why should I implement Kaizen in my organisation?

You don’t have to do any of this. You can just continue to do what you’ve always done... but you’ll get the results that you’ve always got!

And if you don’t want to bother with improvement, don’t worry about it. Your competitors will!

And if you think that it’s all under control over there, remember that up to 80% of all processes add no customer value!

So take on board that these are simple, straightforward techniques that can be easily learnt and applied throughout your company. It doesn’t matter what type of industry of company structure you have – call centre, legal advice, shop, workshop, project management, public, private or even charity. The tools and methods can be universally applied.

Kaizen – What Next?

At Kaizen Training we are experienced Change Leaders. Over recent years our consultants have saved millions of pounds for organisations around the world (and in real cash too!). If you want complex solutions we can do that for you, but our strength is in working with our clients to tailor the solution to their situation now.
We believe in a holistic approach to change and our skills and abilities extend into personal change, influence, communication, leadership, coaching and more.

IIf you are intrigued to know how we can help you and your organisation move towards your future perfect without overload then email me: james@kaizen-training.com or call me on 07785 391149.