Kaizen Events

of ideas that their teams generate and subsequently implement. There is the belief that a supervisor or manager that cannot motivate his/her team to devise ways to improve the company or fails to support his/her team through implementation will not be helpful to the company in the long run. Equally important is the use of self-directed teams throughout the organization. Participants usually receive elaborate training in problem solving and analysis.

Even today, however, the concept of involving an entire workforce in the process of continuous improvement is very foreign to many American companies. Kaizen as a continuous improvement philosophy has been transformed into kaizen, the event. Consequently, now there are references to processes such as a Kaizen Event, Kaizen Blitz, and Kaizen Burst. These three processes will be described in what follows.

Kaizen events are short-duration improvement projects with a specific aim. Typically, they are week-long events led by a facilitator with the implementation team being predominantly members of the area in which the kaizen event is being conducted plus a few people from support areas and even management.

Although they are normally promoted as one-off events, kaizen events should be part of an overall program of continuous improvement to be successful and for gains to be sustained. Events in an environment where they are not supported or understood generally experience gains that are quickly eroded as people revert to their original ways of working. The following steps are vital to the successful implementation of a kaizen event:

1. Someone must lead and facilitate the event. While the area manager or team leader may be the leader, the preferred leader is experienced in lean techniques and philosophies who is adept at facilitating these types of events. 2. Identify team members and collect the relevant data regarding the current state of the process being improved. Voice of the customer data and all the associated process metrics should be collected about one month before the kaizen event. 3. The kaizen team leader will need to establish a team charter with the scope and objectives for the event at least two weeks beforehand.