Tool´s for PM Improvement: Kaizen Method

If you want continuous improvement in your work, you may like to use the Kaizen method. Companies are continuously improving the quality management of their products and services. To do this, they use different practices. Among the best known, we find the Kaizen method of Japanese origin.

The Kaizen method sets in motion actions for the continuous improvement of processes and involves all elements and people in the organization, from managers to external collaborators.

Definition

The concept of continuous improvement has been applied from our most primitive roots. Without continuous improvement we would not evolve. This is how Kaizen translates into Japanese (改善,) beneficial change or simply improvement. Its application is known by the acronym MCCT (Continuous Improvement to Total Quality). Is there a total quality of anything? This would give for another post...

To better understand this concept from the point of view of Japanese philosophy, Kainzen's theory is based on the fact that every day an improvement action must be possible. And it focuses on many small actions with which to improve the quality of our results little by little, rather than making a single big change.

In the end it is about being persistent in our work with small change pills. Thanks to continuous improvement tools that apply the Kaizen method, we gradually leave our comfort zone to improve the quality of our goal. The big challenge or change can scare us, but with the Kaizen theory, it is easy not to fear a small challenge with which we lose little if we fail. This is what it's all about, incorporating small dynamics in a very gradual way, that encourage constancy in our processes.

History

As so often happens in these cases, the origin of this type of method is born in the military forces. In this case, the Kaizen method began to be applied in the middle of the last century, when the US Navy occupied Japan with experts in quality systems and continuous improvement.

These experts provided consulting services for industries related to the Second World War, and were based on training programs called TWI (Training Within Industry). Prominent promoters were William Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran.

Little by little, the Japanese began to assimilate these continuous improvement practices or tools. And the oriental philosophy has many tints of this: of continuous improvement.

One of the Japanese who theorized and named the Kaizen method was the businessman Kaoru Ishikawa, who took it to industrial processes.

The Japanese economy was positioned among the first in the world, and much of the blame lies with the Kaizen method.

Applications

The organizational culture is always impregnated by the way or procedures to achieve its objectives. Industrial processes apply methods that define a way of understanding the organization.

Therefore, in order to apply the Kaizen method, the whole company must work in the same direction. All elements and teams work under the same understanding and prism. A way of understanding things, according to the company's strategy.

This concept is driven by continuous improvement tools that always seek to achieve the best possible results. Among them, today stand out the applications for the planning and management of work, such as Sinnaps.

The tools for continuous improvement with Kaizen are all those that use logics such as PERT and CPM to calculate the optimal workflow, depending on the resources we have. They find the best work performance, to save costs and time, while increasing the quality of our results.

In the past, automation of all this was almost unthinkable for small and medium sized businesses, but today, with continuous improvement tools like Sinnaps, it can be achieved in a very easy way for the whole team. In fact, you can see how simple it is to use this system of improvement and optimization of work.

Examples of use

The Kaizen method allows us to do small things until we find the change we expected, almost without realizing it. A lot of this, have production systems based on agile methodologies.

For example, current software development uses small short-term actions to build a whole from production blocks. For this, we need flexible plans that go at the speed demanded by the current market.

Continuous improvement tools that allow constant re-planning without affecting the overall performance of the project. A fundamental aspect that we can see in applications such as Sinnaps, where you can save project simulations in your test lab or editing mode.