Kaizen

Kaizen, meaning “good change” serves as a foundation to the TPS. Kaizen embodies continuous improvement and is both a process and a philosophy at Toyota. It is through this process that Toyota has been able to continually innovate and improve their manufacturing techniques. Kaizen revolves around the principle of a ‘bottom-up’ structure, where everyone on the manufacturing floor, from the front line workers up, must contribute to Toyota’s continuous improvement (Power, 2011). This encourages teamwork, empowers employees and provides recognition for the efforts of those working at lower levels of the company, as improvement suggestions are not confined to senior management. This concept relies on a non-judgemental environment, where all suggestions are welcomed and taken on board, as Lander and Liker state ‘A no blame environment where problems are seen as opportunities for improvement is necessary to ensure that people can experiment and make mistakes as they learn.’ (Lander and Liker, 2007).

Alukal believes that it is this room for creativity which contributes to the reduction in Toyota’s waste production (Alukal, 2015), a principle goal of the TPS. This distinguishes Toyota from other corporations, which usually run on a top-down systems, with all innovation and change coming from upper management.

Kaizen focuses on a six step principle: (Kato and Smalley, 2011)

1. Discover improvement potential

2. Analyse the current methods

3. Generate original ideas

4. Develop an implementation plan

5. Implement the plan

6. Evaluate the new method

It is with these principles that Toyota aims for improvement using already existing resources. Kaizen “seeks to produce greater quantities of quality product that can be sold using existing manpower, machines and time constraints”