What is Kaizen ?

The term “Kaizen” became synonymous to mean Continous Improvement in Japan from the 1950’s. Many authors referencing it as one of the principle reason behinds Japan’s competitive success in the world market place, particularly within the automobile and manufacoring industies.

Since then, the concepts have been applied to all company types and have been proven a successful model to follow for companies aspiring to be one of the best within their sector.

Kaizen looks for uninterrupted, ongoing incremental change. In other words, there is always room for improvement and we should all be continuously trying to become better. When applied to the workplace Kaizen means continuing improvement involving everyone – managers and workers alike. Kaizen can be implemented by improving every aspect of a business process in a step by step approach, while gradually developing employee skills through training education and increased involvement.

For us, the principles of Kaizen’s continual improvement are:

• Recognising every day is a learning day and working together with our clients (and our own team) to achieve greater success.
• People are the most important organisational asset, empower them.
• It is far easier to improve processes through gradual agreed improvement rather than radical change
• Encouraging everyone within a business to adopt a Kaizen mindset results in a dynamic company and workforce which enables new technologies to be introduced and implemented successfully
• A philosophy of continuous improvement allows changing customer needs to be met