When it comes to making your business more profitable and successful, don't look to re-engineering for answers. A better way is to apply the concept of kaizen, which mean making simple, common-sense improvements and refinements to critical business processes.The result: greater productivity, quality, and profits achieved with minimal cost, time, and effort invested. In this book, you discover how to maximize the results of kaizen by applying it to gemba--business processes involved in the manufacture of products and the rendering of services--the areas of your business where, as the author puts it, the "real action" takes place.
In this sequel to his popular business/quality management book, Kaizen: The Key to Japan's Competitive Success (1986), Imai offers a step forward?continuous improvement (kaizen) applied to the concept of continuous improvement in the workplace (gemba). The book reflects a definite operations bias. Indeed, Imai advocates the removal of all those peripheral things (muda) that cloud the focus of an organization. Some of the principles, such as the need for good housekeeping, seem simplistic, but Imai is on solid ground, demonstrating the practicality of gemba kaizen with a number of abbreviated case studies. |
