Kaizen

What it means

Kaizen is the Japanese approach to continuous improvement: a stream of small changes proposed and made by the people doing the work, instead of one big reorganisation every few years. What counts is the number of changes put in place, not the number of ideas on the board.

Compared with lean, it is not a different worldview but a different scale: lean is the whole system for removing waste, kaizen is its daily routine. Six Sigma answers something else, variation and defects, through statistics and in bounded projects.

Every change goes through a short cycle: plan it, try it, check the result, then either fix it in place or roll it back. That reversibility is what sets kaizen apart from reorganisation - a small trial puts nothing at risk, and when it works it becomes part of the standard procedure from which the next improvement starts.

How it works in practice

In an accounting office kaizen shows up in the length of the close: taking two days out of it comes from a series of small steps, not from one large project. A kanban board keeps the state of every client visible while that happens.

Every change made has to end up in a written procedure, or it leaves with the person who thought of it. The usual first step is to stop retyping figures from paper, read them with OCR instead and review only the exceptions.

With clients, kaizen often starts on their side: documents arrive once a month in an envelope, some without attachments. We agree one small change at a time, such as photographing receipts right after a purchase or forwarding invoices from e-mail straight into document digitisation, and after a month we check how many requests for missing documents have dropped away.

What to watch out for

The common mistake is improving a step that should have disappeared. A firm makes manual invoice entry a fifth faster, pays for the training and for the team time, and a year later scraps the step anyway once document capture is finally automated.

Kaizen also fails when suggestions are collected but nobody decides on them. After a few weeks people stop suggesting and the company loses exactly the knowledge only they have. Each suggestion therefore needs an owner and a decision date, just like a task in a workflow.