Cybersam's Blog - When Kaizen becomes Muda

Monday, July 18, 2005

When Kaizen becomes Muda

Prof. de Albeniz lectured about Kaizen or the English term: "continuous improvement" and how it has greatly benefited Toyota and other Japanese automakers in today's lecture. While I don't question the merits of Kaizen, I am cynical about the way Kaizen is implemented at my company where I still work on a part-time basis. In my humble opinion, there has been a divergence of perception and expectation on the execution of the Kaizen program between management and the employees. It has become apparent that the goal of the program has become nothing more than posting fancy powerpoint slides on bulletin boards than to really use the concepts of the program to solve problems or improve processes. To most employees, the program has become just another fad and despite enormous amount of resources that have been invested in the program. To management, it serves no more than a public relations tool by window dressing the program as the panacea of solving any of the company woes. Sadly, the program that was designed to reduce Muda (Japanese for waste) has itself become muda.

7/18/2005 2:11:15 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00) Comments [3] Business

7/18/2005 6:08:07 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Do you know if the program has had a positive impact at your place of work? It doesn't have to be all that popular if it reduces inventory from 2 months worth to 2 weeks worth...

Yoav Shapira |yoavsAT NOSPAMcomputer dot org

7/19/2005 8:13:13 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

The Kaizen program, called Total Quality Management (TQM), started off as a program that has greatly benefited the manufacturing facilities at the company. But over time, the program has evolved into something that resembles more of a glorified story presentation rather than real continuous improvement activity. Employees are acquiesced to the participation of TQM. Unfortunately, most participants chose not to use the principles of TQM and instead chose to translate unrelated TQM projects into colorful presentations by "reverse engineering" the results into stories. So on paper, it looks like the entire organization is using TQM but in reality, it is nothing more than fluff. What I am trying to say is that TQM, in reality, is hardly practiced in its true form. In my humble opinion, there has to be a conceited effort from management that successful continuation of TQM in the company lies not in TQM festivals or fulfilling powerpoint slide quotas but rather how to improve the attitude of employees to perceive TQM not as a hinderance but a compliment to many of the manufacturing and development processes in the company.

Cybersam

7/25/2005 6:21:29 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

I used to work with Sam, and was dragged into many a BS TQM project. The very mention of those three little letters was enough to get eyes rolling. The problem was that very few people (engineers as much as operators) knew what it was. After abandoning engineering for the dark side, I took an operations mgt class for my MBA. I wish I had taken the class as an engineer. Maybe I would have run so fast from the TQM police ;)

Siobhan |siobhan dot oconnorAT NOSPAMireland dot com