Use your work from PartA of the Project to identify improvement opportunities in the value stream that are suitable for Kaizen events or Work-Outs. 1)List the potential Kaizen events, select the one t
Lean event, Kaizen, or workout
Have you ever wished if you could only gather the right people together, put them all in a room, and pick their brains to address a problem or to improve on one area or process.
Well now you can. It's called a kaizen. Kaizen comes from a Japanese term. Loosely translated, it's change for the better or simply put, improvement.
Sometimes it is called a lean event, a rapid improvement event, or a WorkOut. A few different names all describing the same thing. The term WorkOut was coined at GE. Essentially if you take unnecessary work out of the process to streamline and make it more efficient.
Kaizen is a well organized, structured, and facilitated event to improve a work area, a department, a process, or an entire value stream. These rapid improvement events can vary from one to five days, depending on the objective and scope of the kaizen, such as to understand how the value stream flows or does not flow due to mistakes, delays, and bottlenecks in order to improve it, prioritize what's important to customers of a value stream in order to identify key process metrics, brainstorm and identify likely causes of a problem, generate ideas and prioritize solution alternatives, reduce equipment setup and changeover time, develop or redesign procedures or standard work, or organize a work area to improve workflow.
The tools used do not require any intensive or rigorous data analysis, but they do capitalize on the collective knowledge and hands on experience of participants at the event. Examples of tools and techniques used include value stream mapping and process maps to provide a common understanding of what's currently going on and not going on, Gemba Walk to observe at locations where work is performed, process and value add analysis to identify non value add steps, rework delays and bottlenecks, spaghetti diagrams to map the physical flow of parts or transactions in a facility, the acronyms DOWNTIME, or TIM WOODS, to identify the different types of waste.
Pareto analysis using available data to focus the analysis, brainstorming, cause-effect diagrams, and five Whys to quickly identify potential causes, creativity techniques to develop solution alternatives, and multi voting and prioritization matrices to select alternatives, set up reduction and workload analysis to enable smaller batches and reduce cycle times, 5S to sort and organize items so that there's a place for everything and everything's in its place.
So when is a kaizen or WorkOut applicable? When quick analysis and improvements can be achieved using simple tools that do not require any rigorous data analysis, but can benefit greatly from the collective firsthand knowledge and experience of the right people. The right people are usually operators, stakeholders, and customers of the process or value stream. During a kaizen event, participants work under the guidance of a facilitator who is trained in operational excellence. More specifically in lean tools.
This is important so that the work is done right. The knowledge and skillset of the facilitator has a big impact on the success of the kaizen.
At the end of the kaizen or lead event, the resulting output is a list. The deliverables include approved recommendations and sometimes even implemented solutions. Done. The key to a successful event is planning. Planning should be more than half of the total effort. It should start at least three to four weeks before the event.
Sufficient time and effort should be allocated to gather existing data, obtain primary information from process stakeholders, identify the objective and scope of the event, and develop the agenda. Then you have to identify and invite the right participants for this event. The lean tools used capitalize on participants' knowledge and hands on experience, so it is critical that the right stakeholders are invited. Also, this will improve buy in and acceptance during implementation. To summarize, if a issue does not require intensive data analysis and you want rapid improvements, kaizen or WorkOuts are definitely recommended.
