How Kaizen Consultation Can Enhance the Productivity of Your Business

Kaizen is a Japanese term that translates to “Change for Better”. Practicing Kaizen in your organisation can lead to significant improvement in working patterns, and organisational output and help you reach a step ahead of your competitors. This training involves two key practices – continual improvement and lean operations. 

By following Kaizen training, you will learn to manage your organisation in a better and different way than traditional business practices. For this, finding the right kaizen consultancy support is the first step. Learn how kaizen consulting can transform your business for the better. 

How Kaizen Consulting Can Be Beneficial in Transforming Businesses? 

Kaizen is a philosophy that a lot of businesses follow for more organised workflow, waste reduction, and increased efficiency among employees. Look at the following factors to know about the benefits of kaizen practices in an organisation: 

• Optimum Utilisation of Resources 

One of the main reasons for practising kaizen is to minimise waste production. Through this process, the organisation learns to plan properly and make optimum utilisation of the available resources which can be humans, money, and time – kaizen philosophy includes everything. By keeping track of the improvements, you can easily identify the errors and prevent those from being repetitive; which in turn reduces waste production. 

• Increased Employee Engagement 

Another key purpose of kaizen is employee engagement. Engaged, accountable employees are more likely to stay within the company, thereby increasing retention. If you make your employees feel valued and important in your organisation, they feel motivated. Also, when employees are given responsibilities they feel like they have a purpose and are a significant part of the organisation. 

• Enhanced Teamwork 

Kaizen aims to instil small changes through a collaborative and continual improvement approach. By making collaborative, apprehensive changes, kaizen aims to boost teamwork. Teamwork enhances a sense of accountability and ensures that everyone is working towards the company’s objective. 

• Change with Ease

With big, swift changes, it can be difficult for employees to adjust and also to onboard new employees. This is why the kaizen philosophy aims to make small, continuous improvements for easy adaptations and effective implementation. 

Types of Kaizen Training for Organisations 

There is no hard-and-fast rule to follow in kaizen training. Companies all over the world have adopted kaizen as a common requirement. This training can take various aspects depending on the organisation and its applicability. However, here are some of the most common types of kaizen practices you can follow:  

• Waste Kaizen 

This type of kaizen training aims to eliminate any kind of unnecessary resource from the system to reduce waste production. There are 8 types of waste in lean management that the process might aim to eliminate – transportation, defects, waiting, overproduction, over-processing, motion, unutilised talent, and inventory. 

• Error-Proofing Kaizen 

The purpose of this type of kaizen training is to reduce human errors as much as possible. This could be done by improving the training process or automating some parts of it. 

• Focused- Improvement Kaizen 

Focused-improvement kaizen is implemented to eliminate a single, known issue within the organisation. 

• Lead-Time Kaizen 

When you aim to minimise the amount of time taken to complete a process, you implement lead-time kaizen. 

Techniques for Kaizen Training Improvement 

Along with following the above-mentioned practices, you can also implement some techniques for training improvement: 

• Gemba Walks 

Gemba Walk is the process in which the leader visits the workplace to observe the workflow and show respect to the employees. Afterwards, the leader enquires about the process in which the work is performed and the reason behind that. Through this process, it is easier to identify the deficiency in the work process and implement the necessary changes accordingly. 

• 5S

Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardize, Sustain – the 5S process to identify what is necessary and what is not to minimise waste. 

• Hoshin Kanri 

This is the strategy to align overall organisation objectives with individual goals. 

• PDSA 

Plan, do, study, act/ adjust (PDSA) is a simple improvement cycle that ensures the necessary changes are positively implemented for better workflow.  

• Value Stream Mapping

Through this method, you can identify potential scopes for waste reduction by approaching from a customer’s perspective. Any process or activity which is not indispensable will be eliminated. 

Kaizen consulting can be an effective way to stay ahead of your competitors while maintaining a healthy workplace culture. Various leading companies all around the world such as Pixar and Nestlé have implemented kaizen training for strong, structured, traceable, and controlled change.