Kaizen
Kaizen is continuous, small-step improvement run by the people doing the work, using the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle to test a change, prove it, then lock it in before moving to the next one.
Plan, do, check, act sit in four quarters that loop back to the start once tested.
Reach for this when…
- Big improvement projects keep stalling and nobody owns the day-to-day fixes.
- Frontline staff see the waste every day but have no route to act on it.
- You want improvement to stick, not fade once the consultants leave.
How to run it
- Pick one specific process, not the whole operation.
- Plan a small, testable change with the people who do the work.
- Do it, at small scale, this week.
- Check the result against a real measure, not a feeling.
- Act: lock in the change if it worked, or revise it and go round again.
A worked example
Situation. Maria Santos ran Cebu Woodcraft, a furniture workshop in Cebu, Philippines, losing around a fifth of every timber board to offcuts on the cutting line.
Applied. She ran weekly Kaizen cycles with the cutting team: plan a new nesting pattern for the saw, cut a day's run, check the offcut weight against yesterday's, keep what worked.
Result. Six cycles in, offcut waste was down by a third and the cutting team had taken over running the cycles themselves.
The catch
Kaizen delivers steady gains but rarely a breakthrough, and a business that only does Kaizen can miss the moment a process needs replacing rather than trimming. It also needs real management patience: the gains per cycle are small and easy to dismiss as not worth the meeting time. Without a genuine measure at the check step, teams convince themselves a change worked when it did not.
Origin: Masaaki Imai; Toyota Production System