Day 7: Kaizen, and making it stick

Kaizen is Japanese for "change for the better". In lean it means small, continuous improvements made by everyone, every day.

It comes in two forms. Daily kaizen is the small stuff: an operator moves a bin closer, labels a shelf, fixes a jam that keeps coming back. A kaizen event is a focused project, a team working on one process for a few days. Both have their place. Daily kaizen is where the culture gets built.

To get ideas flowing:

• Make it easy: a card, a board, a phone. Every extra step costs you ideas.
• Answer fast: an idea that sits for a month tells people not to bother. Every idea gets an answer within days, even when the answer is no.
• Let people do it: most small ideas don't need a sign-off. Give teams the authority to just do it.
• Recognize it: post the before and after. Say thank you in the huddle.

Then make it last. This is the hard part:

• Update the standard: every improvement changes how the job is done. If the standard work doesn't change, the improvement fades by the next shift change.
• Check it: look again after 30 days. Is it still in place? Did it do what you expected?
• Share it: if it worked on one line, does another line have the same problem? Toyota calls this yokoten.

That's the seven days. You won't be able to do everything all at once. Start with something small and build on it.

A free quick kaizen template, one page per improvement:

And if you'd like help running all of this in one system across a plant, that's what we built LeanSuite for: 90-day pilot, $3,000 per facility.