Continuous improvement - Concept "Kaizen"Lean manufacturing is a continuous process. It never ends. Improvement of the process is not an exception. Concept of kaizen can be well explained as the method of continuous improvement. Today the world is very competitive. No organization is guaranteed to succeed in the future. This creates the need to be secure in markets. How one can achieve this security. This is by being better than their competition. How to do this? Simple enough answer to this question, by delivering superior services and products to the customers. There is no need to invest millions and millions of dollars to get competitive edge in the market. You have one major resource with you. That is your human resource. Every human being is born with a brain. I am not trying make you laugh, but the truth is many organizations do not understand this simple fact. They think all the thinking has to be done by the management and the workers are there to follow those. Kaizen is the effort put in to get everyone involved in the improvement process. Kaizen events create one pillar in the lean manufacturing. This creates the ground for every employee in your organization to participate in the process of decision making. This creates the upward communication channel in the organization in a sense. Conceptually kaizen works on small and continuous improvements. Small improvements make it easy to implement. This also creates less or no resistance in the system for two reasons. First since the changes are small, so people will not see it as a complete change of way that they are used to work. Secondly and more importantly proposals for changes are coming from themselves not from somebody above them. So people will enjoy the change rather than resisting it. Continuous improvement process will make sure your system is always getting updated. You will stay ahead from the competition. In summery, kaizen is a simple concept. It relies on the human resource rather than capital investments to continue. |
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