How to do Kaizen: A new path to innovation - Empowering everyone to be a problem solver

Kaizen is a system of continuous improvement: an industrial philosophy that embraces absolutely everyone within the company culture. The goal is in maintaining constant improvement towards productivity, quality, safety, waste reduction, and leadership. A vast continuous flow of tiny constructive ideas will invariably make a huge differences in aggregate. And the process never stops...

Kaizen is the key element in the Japanese miracle taping into the creative abilities of every single person in the organization. When understood and appreciated by management, people will joyfully participate to make their work easier, more interesting and build their skills and capabilities.

Gulfstream Corporation in one of their plants in 2009 obtained 40 implemented ideas per employee, both enriching the working lives of their employees and saving millions of dollars. Autoliv in Ogden, Utah is asking each of their employees, in 2010, to submit 96 ideas.

The Kaizen process is simple. Just ask people to look around their work area and identify small problems, come up with possible solutions, present them to their managers and implement them on their own. It is powerful. It works very well.

Review

I love this book and can't wait for it to come out. It is relevant to my situation today. He brought lean to America and continues to bring golden ideas to America through his contacts in Japan. This is truly a breakthrough idea! --Steven Hatch, Lean Specialtist

This is a timely book on a topic of great importance to managers in these difficult times. The concepts in it will not only help you survive the recession, but emerge from it stronger. If you implement a high-performing idea system, like those described in this book, it will raise your organization s performance to a new level, one that would have been impossible to reach before.

How did Autoliv and Gulfstream two of the companies featured in this book get 63 and 33 implemented ideas per person in 2008? This book will show you.

I have always admired both of the authors of this book, because they have always been just enough ahead of their time to be agents of significant positive change. --Alan G. Robinson, Professor, Department of Finance & Operations Management, University of Massachusetts, co-author Ideas Are Free.

This book gives good information for conducting Kaizen for companies. It shows how to develop shared values and beliefs as a foundation for business culture and management. It also explains how to engage all employees and how to manage, measure and evaluate performance of the corporate business and outlined some of the practices or tools that developers can use that are derived from manufacturing processes. I found the thinking behind the author's experience to be fascinating. Actually the ultimate goal of Kazien is to apply the ideal of one-peace flow to all business operations, from product design to launch, order taking physical production and shipment. I know you might need to pick up some information from the book but overall, I would like to suggest these books to lean practitioners and project managers because theses information and explain the processes great sample examples of idea from employees. By Junwoo Park.