How many actions should be open at once?

Fewer than the team can close in the next month. A tracker with 200 open rows is a wish list. Close, merge or drop actions at the weekly review until the list is one the team believes.

Who updates the status?

The owner, before the weekly review. The reviewer's job is to ask about the red rows, not to chase every row for an update.

Should the tracker record savings?

Record the result of an action where one can be measured, but keep the savings claim for the kaizen event report or the project. In LeanSuite, the Kaizen module tracks savings per project.

How is this different from a kanban board?

Both track work. The tracker is a table with dates and sources, which suits a review; the kanban board is columns with a work-in-progress limit, which suits a queue. Some teams use both: the tracker as the record, the kanban board for the week.

Who owns the tracker?

The CI lead or area manager owns the list and runs the weekly review; each row is owned by the person named on it. The owner of the list decides what gets pruned.

How often do you review it?

Weekly for the whole list, in 20 to 30 minutes; daily at the huddle for the two or three rows that matter this week. Monthly, look at the sources.

Lean Studio board · Daily management

Kaizen Action Tracker board

In one sentence

A kaizen action tracker is a single list of every improvement action from events, huddles and walks, each with one owner, one due date and a status, reviewed weekly so late actions are visible and get done.

A kaizen action tracker is the list that keeps improvement honest: every action from a kaizen event, a huddle or a gemba walk, with one owner, one due date and a status the team can see at a glance. Actions that are late show up in red, which is what gets them done.

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Action	Source	Owner	Due	Status
Fit tool life counters on crimp tools	8D · connector return	T. Nguyen	10 Jun	Done
Paint pallet bay at the fire door	Gemba walk 3 Jun	R. Patel	14 Jun	In progress
Second dehumidifier for the coating booth	DMAIC · yield	S. Alvarez	7 Jun	Overdue
Update the die refit instruction	5 Whys · press 2	M. Osei	21 Jun	Not started

When to use it

When to use the Kaizen Action Tracker board

After a kaizen event, to track the 20 to 40 actions that follow it for the next 30 days.
For the actions raised at daily huddles and tier meetings.
When the plant has several improvement teams and nobody can see the whole list.
At the weekly review, to close, chase or re-plan what is open.

What is on the board

1
Action
What will be done, as a verb and an object: fit, move, write, replace.
2
Source
The event, walk or meeting it came from.
3
Owner
One name. A shared action is nobody's action.
4
Due date
A date, not a week; overdue rows turn red.
5
Status
Not started, in progress, done or blocked, updated by the owner.

Running it

How to run a Kaizen Action Tracker session

1
Open the tracker the moment an event, walk or huddle produces an action, and write the action as a verb and an object with its source next to it.
2
Give every row one owner and a date on the spot, in the room, with the owner present. An action assigned to someone absent is a request, not an action.
3
Owners update their own status before the weekly review. Make it their job, not the reviewer's.
4
Weekly, 20 to 30 minutes, the CI lead or area manager reviews: sort by due date, work down the red rows, and ask 'what do you need?' rather than 'why is it late?'
5
Close, merge or drop until the open list is one the team can finish in a month. Record the result of closed actions where one can be measured.
6
Once a month, read the source column: which events produced actions that closed, and which produced lists that did not.
7
Good output: an open list under 30 rows, fewer than a fifth of them late, and every action traceable to the event that raised it.

Worked example · sample data

Worked example

The sample tracker holds four actions from four sources. Tool life counters on the crimp tools came from the 8D on the connector return; T. Nguyen closed it on 10 June. Painting a pallet bay at the fire door came from the gemba walk on 3 June; R. Patel has it in progress for 14 June. A second dehumidifier for the coating booth came from the DMAIC yield project; S. Alvarez owns it, it was due on 7 June and shows red as overdue. Updating the die refit instruction came from the 5 Whys on press 2; M. Osei has not started it, due 21 June. At the weekly review the reviewer went straight to the red row: the dehumidifier was waiting on a purchase approval, so the plant manager signed it in the meeting and the date moved to 21 June with the reason recorded.

The board shown at the top of this page, read through. Invented data, not a customer.

Common mistakes

Actions written as nouns. 'Dehumidifier' is not an action; 'install a second dehumidifier in booth 2' is.
Shared ownership. Two names means neither will do it.
Due 'next week'. Give a date, or the row can never be late.
A tracker with hundreds of open rows nobody believes. Prune it until it is real.
The reviewer chasing statuses. Owners update; reviewers decide.
Losing the source. Without it you cannot tell which events were worth running.

How it works in Lean Studio

1
Start from the Kaizen Action Tracker template: a table with columns for action, source, owner, due date and status.
2
Add a row per action as it is raised and give it an owner and a date on the spot.
3
Owners update their own status; the weekly review sorts by due date and works down the red rows first.
4
Save the finished board to My templates so the next team starts from your version.

Lean Studio boards are drawn with stickies, text, shapes (rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, diamond), arrows and charts, and any board can carry the 15 data widgets, from a scorecard to a kanban. See all widgets and boards.

Also in LeanSuite

Where it goes next in LeanSuite

LeanSuite's Kaizen module runs improvement events and projects with owners, due dates and tracked savings.

In Kaizen & Projects every action has an owner and a due date, projects line up on a Gantt timeline with each delay's reason, and owners are alerted when a phase runs late. Kaizen & Projects
A quick floor fix can be a tag in Daily Issue Management with an owner, a due date set from its priority and reminders before and after the deadline. Daily Issue Management
Actions raised in a tier meeting are created from the board during the huddle, with owners assigned there. Tiered Meetings

See Kaizen & Projects

Open this board in LeanSuite

Kaizen Action Tracker is one of the 30 ready-made boards in Lean Studio, LeanSuite's whiteboard. Try the interactive demo in your browser with sample data, or pilot LeanSuite on your own lines for 90 days, with the setup done by our team.

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