By Gregory A. Farley

Kaizen, the Japanese-born process of continual, discrete, improvement has taken hold in companies all across industrial America, and throughout the service sector as well. Kaizen differs from other management and technology-driven initiatives, such as business process engineering and total quality management, in that it lacks a three-letter acronym, requires little capital investment, and its success does not hinge on management buy-in. It can be as informal as a brainstorming session conducted during a coffee break, or as structured and directed as management sees fit.

At a roundtable discussion conducted by APICS—The Performance Advantage during the recent APICS Conference in Washington, D.C., a handful of consultants, vendors, academics and practitioners gathered to discuss kaizen's role in modern industrial and service enterprises. Participating in the discussion, moderated by software editor Steve Melnyk, were: Ed Heard, The Center for Competitive Vitality; Daniel Lilley, CFPIM, Chrysler Corporation; Tony Collie, CPIM, Rubbermaid Commercial Products; Mark Johnson, IBM; John Herlihy, IBM; Robert J. Hassinger, Moore Products Company; Terry McNichols, Moore Products Company; and Jerry Bapst, The Logistics Management Institute.

The roundtable discussion focused on a specific application of kaizen — the "kaizen blitz," wherein a team of workers sets apart a short amount of time to focus on solving a problem. The participants will usually include workers with specific responsibility for and knowledge of the problem area, workers from downstream and upstream processes, and workers completely disassociated from the subject area.

The discussion began with definitions. "Kaizen blitz, if you know what kaizen is, is really an oxymoron," began Ed Heard. "Kaizen is continual improvement; blitz is an instantaneous or sudden assault."

"It is a quick and continuous improvement activity," explained Jerry Bapst, "but it is more than just doing things immediately. Participants are also developing ideas that they will continue to work with to generate further improvement beyond the actual 'blitz' or 'event' of the moment. So it is quick and continuous. Calling it a blitz or an event suggests, incorrectly, that it occurs at a specific and limited point in time."

"But it is a point in time," argued Collie. "You gather your people and start, you fix your problem, and then you stop. Then the continuous part begins."

"It is important to focus on kaizen as a source of small, incremental change," said Robert Hassinger," but the structure of the 'blitz' as we've implemented it at Moore Products provides for rapid improvement. And five years ago in our organization, rapid improvement was just a pipe dream."

All of the roundtable participants agreed that a kaizen event serves double duty as a working session with specific short-term goals, and as an educational session with the long-term goal of improving an enterprise from top to bottom. When a session is conducted well, participants will walk away with some new perspectives on the business, Hassinger said.

That thought has been adopted wholeheartedly at Rubbermaid, said Collie. "We look for small improvements throughout our operations, and we have many improvement processes. When we get a team together for a kaizen event, it's to go out and get dramatic improvements in that focused area. We put six to eight people to work for three to five days to achieve a specific goal."

"It's dramatic improvement in a bite-size chunk," said Heard.


Why didn't I think of that?
When kaizen works for an enterprise, it's usually because it involves the workers directly involved with the problem process or area, Bapst explained. The workers often lead the process, because they've discovered through experience what's wrong and they've already developed an idea of what has to be done to fix it.

The compressed time-frame of the event also encourages participants to unleash their creativity in problem-solving. Given only one or two days to solve a problem, a team does not have the luxury of delaying action on an issue once it has been identified. "Creativity is pushed to the surface," said Lilley. "The result is not necessarily the best solution, but it's always an improvement over what had existed."

Still, to make the concept work in the long term, it's important to emphasize that there is an educational process involved. At Rubbermaid, the first day of each kaizen event is spent in training. "Everyone in our organization will eventually be familiar with how we conduct a kaizen event," Collie said. "We train them on the subject and on our production system, and we talk about what sorts of things they should look for when they're in the middle of the event.

"It's nice to have creativity," Collie continued, "but it can lead you down a path you don't particularly want to follow."

On the other hand, "there is no way that management is going to be able see all the problems or opportunities in a process," said Hassinger. "Ownership is a powerful aspect of kaizen blitz ... those closest to a process are its owners, and we want them to identify the opportunity. We want them to take the initiative to address problems as they find them. That's how a company makes substantial improvement happen."


Creating team spirit
The most effective kaizen teams are cross-functional, including members from departments throughout an enterprise. By providing multiple perspectives on a problem, teams can develop more types of approaches and more potential solutions. It also helps to guarantee that the team chooses the solution that best serves all departments — what works best for the production planner may hamstring the engineering department.

There's another benefit to building cross-functional kaizen blitz teams, said Terry McNichols. "We've had people working together for years who only know each other in passing," he said. "But if you put two of those people together on a team and they share a success story, now they have a bond. It's a relationship that opens up new resources." Building closer cross-functional personal relationships within the work force strengthens a company by making its members more empathetic and by increasing each worker's understanding of the enterprise as a whole.


It's a matter of time
Kaizen has been around for years, and the term "kaizen blitz" first found its way into the vernacular in the early 1990s. So why is there so much interest in it now?

"At Rubbermaid," said Collie, "It's a matter of time. We recognized that we need to get where we're going, in terms of competition and quality, and we need to get there now. We've always had continuous value improvement processes. We form teams and six months later we're still working on the issue. We realized we needed to develop a time-based strategy."

"Business process reengineering a few years ago fixed a lot of broken processes," said Lilley. "But afterward, we had so many improvement projects going on that the people in one department couldn't implement their desired changes because the guys in the next department were in the middle of redesigning their processes. Everybody was on hold.

"At the same time," he continued, "once a manager starts a project, it's going to be six months before he sees any results, and his job is on the line already. Starting on small projects and keeping them going and expanding is a more attractive alternative to ripping things up and starting over."

At Moore Products, McNichols said, "the directive to change was coming down from within the company, and the rank and file wasn't necessarily buying into management strategy. The blitz, though, is going out to the process owners. These people know best what's wrong, and now they're getting the resources and the management support to make important changes happen. It's a grass roots kind of initiative. When it works in one area, the excitement spreads. By convincing the process owners to buy into the blitz, you can accomplish a lot more than any management edict."

Hassinger added that the process has been so widely and completely embraced at Moore, that blitzes sometimes happen without a management facilitator. He returned to the office after a three-day business trip, he said, to find that part of the shop floor had been rearranged in his absence. "They'd had the training, they knew what they wanted to fix and they understood who their stakeholders were," he said. "They took the initiative to solve the problem."

But it's not just the rank and file buying into the blitz process, said Heard. Management, too, is tired of empty promises and improvement projects with three- and four-year implementation cycles. "When you go to a meeting and tell company management you can complete a project in two days, or four days or two weeks, and you promise you can show them quantifiable results when you're finished, they're going to buy into it," said Heard.

Coming Next Month In the January issue of APICS—The Performance Advantage will feature the results of the second roundtable discussion held at APICS '97: Software System Selection.

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