Understanding Kaizen

To explain Kaizen, the nature of Kaizen helps to understand itself. The word, Kaizen, has gained recognition in the English vocabulary now. In Japanese, Kaizen means continuous improvement. The word implies improvement that involves all workers and entails relatively little expense. Toyota has been known as the first company that has started Kaizen. The application that Toyota used was called "Toyota Production System", where all line personnel are expected to stop their moving production line in the case of any abnormality, and suggestions for improvement are rewarded. They succeeded eliminating all the wastes. Kaizen is used for placing the terms as productivity, total quality control (TQC), zero defects (ZD), and just-in-time (JIT). Therefore, Kaizen is a main concept for all these practices.

A lot of people have misunderstood about Kaizen. People have the stereotype that Kaizen can make dramatically changed immediately, and bring the profits right away. However, this is not true. Improvements under kaizen are small and incremental, but the kaizen will bring the huge results over time. Japanese management and Western management are different from the concept of the management. For western management, they tend to focus on the worships innovation which is pretty much relying on the changes in the technological breakthroughs. On the other hand, for the Japanese management, kaizen is not usually dramatic incident. But innovation is one –shot improvement, and its results are often problematic, while the kaizen process, which is based on common sense, low-cost approaches and low risk approach, assures incremental progress that pays off in the long run.

There are some concepts to understand kaizen. First of all about is "Kaizen and Management". Basically, management has two sides: maintenance side and improvement side. Maintenance refers to maintain current technological, managerial and operating standards through training and discipline. Improvement refers to elevate current standards. Please recall that the difference between western management and Japanese management that are explained earlier, the western management should be classified as the edge of improvement side. On the other hand, Kaizen should be classified in a little improvement side from the middle of two. So, kaizen signifies small improvements as a result of ongoing efforts. Innovation involves a dramatic improvement as a result of a large investment of resources in new technology or equipment. However, western managers like to chase an immediate profit, they tend to overlook the long-term benefits that kaizen can bring, and also innovation has a lot of risks due to the high costs.