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LEAN Work Culture Implementation – Kaizen Approach, The TOYOTA way

The Key to Improve Performance Quality, Productivity And Profitability through People Engagement !!!

Context: In today’s scenario of globalization, even World-Class companies are struggling to survive. Not only they are reshaping to overcome their own weaknesses and stretching to leverage their strengths but also challenging their value chains.  Every other workplace naturally needs to change drastically from their conventional management practices in order to become leaner and leaner (i.e. to on-goingly reduce inputs by half, enhance value to customer by double). Who else can do this but their empowered employees? This is a big challenge.  Managements are facing difficulties in changing mindsets of people to take the above challenges head-on. 

TOYOTA has shown the way long ago! Get all your associates Kaizen Conscious to build strength inherently in your organization. Only they can delight customer/s in the value chain, if they so wish. Kaizen is a Japanese word literally meaning, “Change for the Better”. It stands for and implies Continual Improvements in all walks of life. Kaizen strategy in TOYOTA, which helps it's employees not only in challenging previous growth targets and LEAN achievements but also exceeding them. That is also one of the prime reasons why Toyota and it's management approach holds high regards in most part of the world.

Resulting continual improvement attitude (the Kaizen-Culture) helps diagnose root cause/s of inefficient working in organisations. It offers a systematic approach to changing attitudes (mindset) and behavior of people from one of fire-fighting crises management to that of prevention orientation thereby leading to miraculous organisational change reflected in terms of techno-commercial business results. It not only helps in continuing to improve performance of existing business lines through incremental innovations on products, processes, and costs but also tacklesdisruptive changes through breakthrough improvements. In short, it makes employees proactive who in-turn help establish and achieve newer benchmarks of business performance measures in key result areas (KRA), both tangible and intangible. 

The legendary Mr. Peter Drucker has strongly advocated Kaizen Culture in his article ‘The New Society of Organisations’ in Harvard Business Review. The success of post war economic miracle in Japan is normally attributed to techniques such as JIT, TQM, Kanban, Five-S, etc. But none of these can be accorded credit in absence of the single most important common factor the ‘Kaizen’ system. 

Gaby Mendoza in February’92 World Executive Digest wrote on the “Secret of Toyota’s success” where he refers to Kaizen as the “Driver” and “Which must be installed first”. With the help of derivative philosophies (Pearls) such as JIT, TQM, Kanban, 5-S, TPM, Pokayoke, SMED, Quality Circles, QFD, Taguchi Techniques, 6-SIGMA & even procedure oriented systems such as ISO 9000, ISO 14000, QS 9000; Kaizen then smoothly drives the organisation on its journey to be a LEANER company. In fact, Kaizen-thread binds these pearls to form a Kaizen-Necklace (the concept from Book “World Of Kaizenl” by Shyam Talawadekar).

Objectives of Lean Education: Companies wishing to be on Lean Journey often fail to implement it because they tend to copy-paste it, then struggle and give-in rather than appreciate the principles underlying any such new system and then adopt/adapt it. Our unique approach will help understanding the Concept, the Principles; its' interlink with implementation of series of management techniques (the Kaizen Pearls) mentioned above, and most importantly it's softer (behavioral) aspects along-with pitfalls in implementation. One can learn how positive attitude can be 'manufactured' by looking at wasteful practices in any workplace, continuously correcting them, converting impossible into “Simply Possible"!

For Whom: Being LEANER organisation should be a prime goal for any manufacturing or service organisation. Application oriented education should begin with their Top Management (Cross-functional team who has authority to influence company-wide changes) in particular.  Anyone else (from any functional area) who wants to function as a change agent for organisational transformation may follow the suit but the top must learn-n-lead the process. 

Typical1 Achievements & Improvements in KRAs or KPIs for some of our CUSTOMERS 

through our direct involvement in integrated LEAN3 implementation (See 10-Step Lean-Process) are as follows.

The results2 (KRAs or KPIs) are easily convertible into Tangible-Monitory-Terms (ROI, ROCE, Payback period, etc. as AOP tragets)