Kaizen is a Japanese ideology oriented on continuous improvement across all areas of life. Kaizen’s actions can enhance every purpose of a company when making hiring decisions, from production to marketing and from the Manager to the factory workers. Kaizen strives to reduce costs through the improvement of centralized procedures and tasks in all systems of an establishment. By knowing Kaizen’s fundamentals, practitioners can incorporate this approach into their attempts at incorporating Six Sigma best practices in an organization.
What is Kaizen?
Kaizen’s aim goes beyond mere inefficiency. The method refines the workplace when done well, removes needless troublesome work, and shows employees how to find and remove waste in company processes.
Usually, Kaizen’s introduction takes place in every company in 3 phases:
Encouraging participation
Sensitivity preparation programs are a must for all staff. To further facilitate employee participation, support unique Kaizen practices, and suggest providing financial or substantial rewards after the adoption of approaches from Kaizen’s actions.
Education and training
Basic preparation is needed to learn what Kaizen’s nature is – and isn’t. Team leaders need to be prepared to consider Kaizen in the sense of corporate strategy, which requires to be pursued systematically to accomplish desirable business goals. They will need to be informed of the need for an unbiased appraisal and approach to increase participation.
Quality level development
Practitioners may strive to concentrate on long-term engagement, universal deployment, cooperation with corporate priorities, and strategic strategies after the preparation period is finished. Management needs to form a central department for performing the assessment and deployment of Kaizen.
Using Kaizen and Six Sigma Together
Six Sigma can bring about revolutionary improvements to internal processes. Yet cost savings from these project breakthroughs aren’t necessarily known. The cause for this is the lack of minor changes in Six Sigma organizations and upkeep. Note that Six Sigma supports establishing uniform operating procedures and ensuring that workers are adopting them. This is a significant drawback since systems usually deteriorate without adequate supervision and quality improvement.
But if an enterprise adopts a Six Sigma hybrid framework, rigid adherence to existing procedures, as well as a team that actively finds ways to enhance the processes (Kaizen), it achieves optimum efficiency. Such a framework places a company in a more significant economic and financial role and, in contrast to the developments made by Six Sigma, there are constant developments.
Six Sigma, in general, offers the scientific rigor and precision required for a good comprehension of the essence of problems and systems and successful solutions. However, it does not foster a philosophy of learning and, as such, can not be seen as a substitution for Kaizen. Indeed when paired with Kaizen, it performs well.
Kaizen initiatives include a range of areas for development, including:
- Quality – Goods, facility, job atmosphere, experience, and procedures strengthened
- Price – Personnel and investment, by utilizing inventory, electricity, by resources
- Delivery – Cutting time, activity, and non-value-added practices
- Administration – Enhancing processes, preparation, leadership, marketing, planning, performance, computer systems, recording, and monitoring
- Protection – Diminishing dangerous circumstances, unhealthy working environments, the risk of loss of capital, and environmental harm
Six Sigma vs Kaizen
There is a significant contrast between the Kaizen principle and Six Sigma. The term ‘Kaizen’ originates from ancient Japanese philosophy. When it was first invented, the concept was to strive relentlessly for success in all aspects of an individual’s life. After WWII it was first used in a formal context. Six Sigma, on the other hand, is a much newer concept of shift that emerged around the early 80s.
Kaizen is often an overarching type of process management aimed at improving all areas of an organization through standardization, waste elimination, and efficiency gains. Six Sigma is a specific method of improvement that seeks to enhance the quality of the product. This is also done by analyzing the possible causes of goods of low quality and eradicating the root causes of such defects. Instead of reviewing all of the processes (like Kaizen), only those that affect the final product’s quality will be examined.
When Kaizen is integrated into an organizational process, there is a broad scope for the focus on enhancement. Any worker’s job is checked irrespective of his or her rank (top management, middle management, line management, or tactical stage). On the other hand, Six Sigma is mostly more focused on arithmetic, which includes a measure of method deviation from perfection. It is embedded profoundly in mathematical equations and analysis. Its goal is to consider zero faults while completing the project.
Despite these variations, both principles can save a considerable amount of time and money for an organization. And when it’s embraced together, they perform well.
To learn more about how Kaizen can be integrated with Six Sigma practices and how it will benefit your company the best, you should consider pursuing popular Quality Management certification courses from an accredited training provider.
Some of the popular quality management courses through which the workforce can get trained to remove different types of waste in an organization are:
