Crash Course In Kaizen: Improve Your Business, Your Life
The Kaizen Concept
The Japanese term “Kaizen,” which translates as “Improvement,” is part business management system and part deeply-rooted philosophy in Japanese culture. Popularized by Toyota, Kaizen stresses that continuous, incremental improvement is at least as critical for a business as periodic, large-scale innovation.
One of the primary tools of the Kaizen process is the PDCA Cycle, shown below. Implementing this tool starts by standardizing an operation or activity within your business. Once standardized, measure the key performance indicators associated with this operation: time, product or inventory required, whatever the case may be. These measurements are then compared against the requirements that have been set. Innovation within the process then drives increases in productivity until the requirements are met or exceeded. These innovations then become part of the new standard, and the process starts over again.
As each area of a business continues through this cycle, it stands to reason that the company can’t help but continue to improve. Japanese companies, unlike their Western competitors, believe that the process is just as important as the end result, the impact on the bottom line.
Why Should I Care?
You may be wondering how a management style used by Toyota, one of the largest companies in the world, could possibly apply to your small business. It doesn’t just have to apply to your business, it’s something you can apply to every aspect of your life.
The Kaizen principle hinges upon continuous effort and a learning mindset. In one study of Kaizen, it was suggested that any proposed improvement that saves more than a second of your time is worth implementing and making part of your new standard procedure. At the individual level, this may not make sense because we lose far more time than that checking email or reading the news, but it’s worth considering.
If you spend a lot of time working on your computer, consider how much time is lost to slow load times or poor performance. How much time (not to mention peace of mind) might you gain each day simply by adding more memory to your computer? Now, multiply that out over a year or two. It’s about a $30-50 upgrade that will pay itself off in no time.
How about browsing the web? If you work online, how much time are you wasting waiting for pages to load? Benchmarks have shown that Firefox 3 loads pages up to five times faster than Internet Explorer 7, three times faster than Firefox 2, and twice as fast as Safari.
If you were to implement just these two minor improvements and they saved you 20 minutes each day, you’d have an extra 83 hours at the end of the year.
Kaizen can be applied to every facet of your life and business. Start by documenting how you do things. Standardize your operations, then determine the cost (in time and resources) associated with each step. What can you do to save a few minutes? Can you automate something you do regularly in Word or Excel using a macro?
The greatest limitation on small business growth is time. You’re only one person and you can only do so much. Shouldn’t you be making the most of your time?
More on Kaizen in the weeks and months to come…
What an inspiration! Go Kyle Go! Buckets and buckets of blessings on your...
[…] Crash Course In Kaizen: Improve Your Business, Your Life By Kyle The Japanese term “Kaizen,” which translates as “Improvement,” is part business management system and part deeply-rooted philosophy in Japanese culture. Popularized by Toyota, Kaizen stresses that continuous, incremental improvement is …- http://onyourbusiness.com Technorati Tags: Crash Course In Kaizen […]
July 7th, 2008 at 11:47 pm