Matt Barber
Kaizen is a Japanese word that means "change for the better". In manufacturing it describes continuous improvement: small, regular changes made by everyone, from the leadership team to the people on the line. It sits at the heart of the Toyota Production System, which has shaped manufacturing practice around the world.
Most factories now have a continuous improvement (CI) team, or at least a CI lead. The work they do depends on facts about where time and material are lost. That's where MES/MOM comes in.
Where Kaizen came from
"Kaizen" is an everyday Japanese word for improvement. Its use as a management philosophy grew out of post-war Japanese industry, helped by the US Training Within Industry (TWI) programmes of the late 1940s and 1950s, and was refined most famously inside Toyota.
The idea reached a wide Western audience through Masaaki Imai's 1986 book Kaizen: The Key to Japan's Competitive Success. A few years later, Western researchers coined the term "Lean" to describe the Toyota approach, popularised by The Machine That Changed the World in 1990.
Kaizen started in manufacturing, but its principles are now used far more widely, in healthcare and software development among others.
The core ideas
You'll find many lists of "Kaizen principles" online. These are the ideas that turn up consistently in the original sources:
- Continuous improvement and respect for people. Toyota describes these as the two pillars of the Toyota Way. Improvement never stops, and it's done with the people who do the work, not to them.
- Small steps, by everyone. Many small, low-cost improvements, made continually at every level, rather than waiting for a big project.
- Go to the gemba. The gemba is where the work happens. Regular gemba walks, where leaders walk the shopfloor to see problems or potential problems first hand, beat any report read in an office.
- Standardise, then improve. A common saying in Lean circles: without a standard, there can be no Kaizen. You need a stable way of working to measure an improvement against.
- Eliminate waste. Muda, the Japanese word for waste, covers anything that doesn't add value for the customer, including waiting, defects, overproduction, excess movement and excess inventory.
- Plan, do, check, act. The PDCA cycle: plan a change, try it, check the result, then standardise it or try again.
Quality circles and suggestion schemes are two classic ways of putting this into practice. Small teams meet regularly to solve problems in their own area, and everyone is encouraged to put forward ideas, however small.
A Kaizen cycle, step by step
| Step | What happens | Where MES/MOM helps |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Find the opportunity | Spot a process with clear room for improvement | Loss data shows where time and material actually go |
| 2. Understand the process | Map how it really runs and measure its performance | Cycle times and downtime reasons by step, captured automatically |
| 3. Plan the change | Decide what to change and how success will be measured | A baseline to measure against, using the same KPIs as everyone else |
| 4. Make the change | Try it, and adjust as you go | Digital work instructions and checklists put the new standard in front of operators |
| 5. Check and repeat | Standardise what worked, then start again | Before-and-after data, so the result is a fact rather than an impression |
Finding the opportunity. Without good data, improvement teams tend to work on whatever is loudest. Automatic loss capture, including short stops that rarely make it onto paper, shows where the biggest losses really are. More in Manufacturing KPIs beyond OEE.
Understanding the process. Many CI projects start with weeks of observation with a clipboard and stopwatch. When cycle times and downtime reasons are already recorded by product and machine, that study can take hours instead. Map the process too, because data alone won't show you the workarounds. See process mapping.
Making the change stick. A new standard written on paper is easy to drift away from. Built into digital work instructions, it's the default for every shift. More in digital work instructions.
Checking the result. Improvements often fade within months of a kaizen event. With the same measures running continuously, you can see whether a gain has held, and step in when it starts to slip.
The digital morning meeting
The daily performance meeting is one of the most practical places to see Kaizen and MES/MOM working together.
In many factories the morning meeting takes a long time to prepare. Data comes from ERP, spreadsheets, separate reports and handwritten notes, and the first part of the meeting is spent agreeing whose numbers are right.
A typical agenda runs in a set order:
- Health and safety. Accidents and near misses first, always.
- Quality. Defects, holds and customer issues.
- Performance. Output, OEE and the biggest downtime losses.
- Big issues and projects. Anything that needs escalating or a decision.
- The day ahead. What's planned today, and what could get in the way.
- Actions. New actions logged with an owner, and last time's actions followed up.
With connected operations, the meeting runs from one screen that follows the same agenda, with yesterday's data already in it. Nobody needs to prepare it.
Actions are logged against the data that prompted them, and the open ones come back at the next meeting until they're closed, so you can see whether they worked. That's PDCA running every day. More on the data behind it in Time to truth.
Benefits and challenges
| What it looks like | |
|---|---|
| Benefit: efficiency | Waste removed step by step, so output rises and costs fall |
| Benefit: quality | Defects and their causes found and fixed at the source |
| Benefit: engagement | People who do the work help improve it, and see the results |
| Benefit: visibility | Improvements measured, so the organisation can see what works |
| Challenge: culture | Continuous improvement has to become a habit, not a campaign |
| Challenge: momentum | Results build up gradually, and early gains can lead to complacency |
MES/MOM doesn't solve the cultural challenges. It does make the results visible, which helps keep momentum going.
My view
Kaizen needs facts, not opinions. The best CI teams I've worked with spend their time improving rather than collecting data, and that's only possible when the shopfloor data is captured automatically and trusted by everyone. A good MES/MOM won't create a Kaizen culture on its own, but it removes a lot of the friction that kills one.
How much of your CI team's time goes on gathering data rather than acting on it?
