Leveraging the Benefits of Kaizen
By Tom McBride, Partners for Creative Solutions, Inc.
The Japanese word kaizen, meaning
“continuous improvement”, has been widely recognized for years. Often
thought of as an ongoing series of small improvements, kaizen can also produce
large and rapid gains critical to an organization’s goals through team
projects called kaizen events.
Kaizen engages workers in simplifying work, reducing stress and fatigue, and
improving quality and efficiency. Dramatic results have been documented
over the years, but few organizations have achieved the full potential of
kaizen. So, what is the secret to getting much more from our investments
in kaizen? A large part of the answer lies in Dr. Deming’s Plan, Do,
Check, Act cycle (PDCA), a form of the scientific method. (Note:
Deming gave credit to his mentor, Dr. Walter Shewhart)
To illustrate, let’s look at an example of a successful kaizen application
involving a growing medical office that was receiving a large number of
complaints about their appointments process. The leadership team realized
that lasting success would require full use of PDCA to achieve the following
elements.
- Kaizen
event - A project team that included work group members was launched to
quickly develop and implement solutions. Applying the complete PDCA
cycle the team put radical improvements in place and verified the new
process within days. As a result, complaints fell substantially.
- Sustain
the gains - Results from the kaizen event were sustained through
documentation, training, measurements (complaints, errors, time to get
appointments), leadership, and ownership by the work group. This
element continued PDCA with emphasis on check and act.
- Continue
to improve - Kaizen became a daily part of the way work was done, and
the work group made improvement after improvement by perpetuating the PDCA
cycle.
In this example all three elements were effectively executed to fully utilize
PDCA and achieve a significant gain. However, most organizations do not
follow through as well. In fact, William Lareau states in his book, “Office
Kaizen”, that only 1 in 20 succeed at element 2 and 1 in 1000 achieve element
3 without special kaizen events or management intervention.
Significantly greater returns are achieved when kaizen
fully utilizes PDCA as our example organization demonstrated by its thoroughness
with elements 2 and 3. Furthermore, when a sound kaizen process and culture are
in place as a foundation, it is likely that major technology and strategy
changes will also yield much better results.
