1. Introduction
We are already passing through the second decade of the 21st century and the competition worldwide is sharpening day by day. It is no longer just a mere conjecture or a simple affirmation, it is a reality that we live in an intimate and intense way, the competition is global and we must be prepared to face it.
Today western companies are exposed to a clamp attack, on the one hand rising costs of raw materials, and on the other, prices of products from Asia lower than those generated in the West. Both the increase in the price of raw materials and the leadership in the supply of low-cost products is focused on the Chinese economy.
Undoubtedly, the world has ceased to be what it was, but not as a result of the successive changes, but because of this veritable tidal wave of Chinese and other Southeast Asian products over Western economies.
In this super competitive reality that the world economy is going through, companies must be better every day. And this is valid even for Chinese companies, which apart from the cost must constantly and consistently improve both their quality and the quality of services in order to continue expanding in the West, and to overcome their own internal competitors.
All of the above companies must face at this time one of the main, if not the biggest, economic and financial crisis in history. This brings with it lower sales, collection problems, higher costs, serious liquidity problems and an uncertain future.
Within this very complicated situation, companies have the challenge of improving day after day in the search for their subsistence. In a world with increases in the unemployment rate, improvement aimed at staying competitive is vital.
In the 1970s, the application of new operating techniques allowed Japanese companies to face the crisis caused by the great rise in the price of oil. Kaizen linked to "just in time" was the central element within this new conceptual framework, which allowed Japanese companies to rise to the top of global competitiveness over time.
This world that we have to live in is unfortunately very cruel, an environment in which day to day and relentlessly only the companies that best adapt to the changes in their environment will survive.
You are currently living in the same situation that made the application of kaizen imperious:
• Sharp increases in the costs of raw materials and energy.
• Excessive capacity of production facilities.
• Increasing competition between companies in saturated or recessive markets.
• Changing consumer values and stricter quality requirements.
• Need to introduce new products more quickly.
• The urgent need to lower the balance point.
In such a situation, it is essential to insist on kaizen not as a method to reach an objective, but as a way to go for the survival and competitiveness of the company. In this environment of transformation, it is necessary to find new ways of coexisting with the changes, making them advantageous for the company, in relation to the competitors. Thus, kaizen is necessary to support the survival and future growth of the company.
Kaizen is a humanistic approach, because you expect everyone to participate in it. It is based on the belief that every human being can contribute to improving their workplace.
2. Definition
Kaizen can be defined as progressive improvement that involves everyone, including both managers and workers. Kaizen recognizes in its philosophy that any company has problems, and these must be detected, eliminated and prevented.
Since kaizen is a constant process that involves everyone in the company, everyone from the administrative hierarchy to the front line is involved in some aspects of kaizen.
What differentiates kaizen as a continuous improvement system from western continuous improvement systems is that kaizen is not merely a succession of steps to be taken within a work method in order to overcome a circumstance or reach a goal, Kaizen responds to a philosophy and fundamentally aims to reach the objectives through three fundamental tools that are the standardization of processes and their constant improvement, the permanent search for waste and its elimination, and the organization, order and cleaning as the basis for reduction. of costs and cycle times, improvement in quality and security levels, and greater compliance in customer satisfaction levels. Thus, continuous improvement in kaizen seeks to improve quality, costs, logistics, customer satisfaction, safety and products, always taking into account the improvement in standards, the continuous elimination of changes (waste or waste) and the best organization, order and cleanliness of the elements and spaces of the company.
Kaizen is applied to the company as a whole, involving both administrative processes and activities, as well as productive and sales activities, whether they are services or goods.
Kaizen can and should be applied by all kinds of entities, be they public or private, dedicated to primary activities, such as secondary or tertiary.
Kaizen is a consumer-oriented strategy for improvement, as all kaizen activities are intended to lead to a higher level of customer and consumer satisfaction.
No company can and should not be exempt from continuous improvement in its processes, with the aim of improving both its economic and financial and operational indicators. The message of the kaizen strategy is very clear in this regard, because not a day should go by without some kind of improvement being done somewhere in the company.
The starting point for improvement is to recognize such a need. This is feasible by recognizing the existence of problems to overcome. If no problem is recognized, the overriding need for improvement is also not recognized. Complacency is a devastating enemy for the kaizen spirit. Thus kaizen emphasizes problem recognition and provides clues for problem identification. Once these are identified, they must be solved, so kaizen provides the appropriate tools and methodologies for their resolution.
Kaizen is industrial engineering for profit making, also known as producing industrial engineering. Unless industrial engineering results in reduced costs and increased profits, it makes no sense, as Taiichi Ohno puts it.
3. Kaizen concepts to always keep in mind
Thinking within a kaizen philosophy implies always keeping in mind a series of concepts, which must be taken into account when analyzing and diagnosing processes, as well as when making decisions and solving problems.
• The first concept implies that each of the members of the company must be responsible for both maintaining and improving standards.
• The second critical concept is to focus on the processes, since improving these improves the results of the company. Orienting oneself according to the results, whatever the way of reaching them, is not the same as improving processes continuously and consistently, which brings with it the improvement of results. Only the improvement of the processes guarantees the survival and growth of the company. Focusing on processes requires a long-term vision, since they are directed at people's efforts and often require behavioral change.
• Aplicar la rueda de Deming: Estandarizar-Realizar-Evaluar-Actuar (EREA) y Planificar-Realizar-Evaluar-Actuar (PREA). Cada vez que las cosas salen mal, como cuando se generan productos defectuosos o clientes insatisfechos, se deben buscar las causas fundamentales, emprender acciones para corregir la situación y cambiar el procedimiento de trabajo para eliminar el problema. En terminología kaizen, los gerentes deben implementar el ciclo EREA. Una vez que los estándares actuales se aplican y que los trabajadores hacen sus trabajos de acuerdo con dichos estándares y sin anormalidades, el proceso está bajo control. El siguiente paso consiste en ajustar el statu quo y elevar los estándares a un nivel superior. Ello implica la aplicación del ciclo PREA. El primer requerimiento es mantener los estándares. The system is under control when there are standards that are followed by workers that do not generate abnormalities. Once the system is under control, the next challenge is to improve the status quo.
• Quality and safety first. You should never take precedence when making decisions about results over quality and safety. This applies to both the philosophy and the culture of the company. Once economic advantages are prioritized over measures aimed at safeguarding quality and safety, workers get the message that the company cares little about quality and much about results. Once this takes place, employees' thoughts are polluted, they will never believe in improvement objectives in terms of quality, safety and customer satisfaction again.
• Talk with data. Fundamentally statistical data. Without data we cannot know if the processes are improving or getting worse. Without data, we do not know if the standards are met or not, and how far from them we are. We must have data to be able to know the reason for the deviation of the costs and in this way we can analyze them and apply the measures to correct them. The same in the other subjects, dealing with quality, cycle times, levels of customer satisfaction, levels of productivity, among others. Having reliable statistical data for analysis is one of the backbones of kaizen. Based on these data, we will know the magnitude of the problems, we will be able to assign priorities when solving them and we will have the means to assess the improvement or worsening of the situation. Having data is critical in distinguishing the vital few from the many trivials, that is, those few causes that generate most of the defects, costs or unproductivities, from those many causes with low specific weight in the total. The basic approach to quality control is to locate the "culprits," or causes of dispersal, by collecting data. Some causes may seem reasonable in theory but should never be considered good without data. Likewise, once the data is studied, we may realize that totally unsuspected causes have a significant degree of contribution.
• The next process is the client. If for each process there is a client (internal or external), this implies knowing the requirements of said client, and therefore adopting the measures to comply with said requirements, not passing on products or information with failures or errors.
Knowing these concepts, we will be able to analyze each situation that comes up in our daily work, asking ourselves and asking managers and staff:
• Are standards set for processes and products? Are they met? Is there a policy and strategy to improve them?
• Do the policies and decisions of senior management prioritize the improvement of systems and processes in order to improve results, or do you focus on generating profitability at the cost of losing quality and competitiveness in the medium and long term?
• Is the pursuit of quality and safety objectives always pursued? Has profitability ever been prioritized over the quality of products and services?
• Does each person and sector in the organization know which are its clients (internal or external), what they require, and what must be done to comply with it? Do we control everything before delivering it to our internal or external client?
• Do we have enough data to analyze the various situations and problems in terms of quality, costs, productivity, safety and satisfaction, among others? Do we have identified which are the vital few and which are the many trivial ones?
• Are we making decisions based on reliable data, or are we based on simple assumptions?
4. Kaizen systems
There are a series of systems that must be established in order to achieve the full success of a kaizen strategy, these being:
• Total Quality Control
• Just in Time Production System
• Total Productive Maintenance
• Deployment of Policies
• Suggestion System
• Small Group Activities
Quality is something that involves everyone in the company, and not only the products and services marketed must have quality, but also all internal processes. Key processes must be continuously identified, controlled and refined, with the aim of improving results. Quality is the basis of everything, of the improvement in productivity, the reduction of costs, the increase in profitability, a higher degree of satisfaction on the part of employees, customers and distributors, higher levels of safety and a high competitiveness. In some companies it is only appropriate to standardize and standardize certain and certain internal processes, for the Kaizen philosophy quality includes everything and goes far beyond mere quality certifications or certifications. Some concentrate their resources on certifying the quality of certain components, processes and products or services, kaizen concentrates on the quality of each and every one of the company's activities and processes.
Just in time significantly reduces cost, facilitating the delivery of products and services on time, and contributing to the increase in company profitability. But to achieve the proper functioning of the just-in-time system, it is necessary to carry out a series of kaizen activities in order to eliminate waste from the production, commercial, financial and administrative processes.
We can expect that the waste or waste exists in many ways in a factory or service company. When the waste is bad enough, the waste is no longer in the factory, it is the factory that is in the waste.
If you ask someone, "What does the Just in Time Production system mean?" And that person responds: "It means doing just what is necessary, when it is needed, and just in the necessary amounts", this will indicate that this person at least has an intellectual idea of the Just in Time Production System. But if that person's response was, "It means the total elimination of waste," then this person may have learned Just in Time both physically and intellectually. Just in Time (JIT) means technical ideas for the total elimination of waste.
The Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) concentrates its actions on improving the quality of the equipment, thereby trying to maximize their efficiency through a total preventive maintenance system.
The company's management must implement a long-term strategy, made up of medium and short-term objectives, in order to direct and guide kaizen activities. This is called the deployment of policies and consists of setting goals for each sector, process and activity of the company so that they focus their improvement efforts on achieving them. Kaizen without a goal, it's like traveling without a destination. Kaizen is effective when everyone works to achieve a goal.
The fundamental goal of the suggestion system is to develop kaizen minded and self-disciplined workers. For the Japanese, rather than talking about suggestions, they talk about proposals (teian). The kaizen system appeals to workers to improve their working methods or to help strengthen the operation and profitability of the company. The administration of the companies that really practice kaizen makes a determined effort to involve employees in continuous improvement through suggestions.
The circles of quality control, such as the elimination of changes and the resolution of problems, constitute group activities made up of members of a sector, process or several processes, either permanently or for the purposes of a particular case, with the aim of address various issues or problems related to quality improvement, cost reduction, productivity increase, safety improvement, prevention and elimination of waste (muda). For their activities they not only use various statistical tools, but also a process consisting first of all in defining the problem, followed by the analysis of the causes, identification of possible solutions, selection of the best solution, development of an action plan, the implementation of it and its subsequent evaluation.Small group activities can be defined as small groups of volunteers, informal, organized within the organization, to perform specific tasks in the workshop. Small group activities represent a non-confrontational and informal way of solving problems and introducing successive improvements.
Among the advantages resulting from group activities we have:
• improving morale, • ostensibly improves communication between employees of the same or different processes, and between them and management, • the group solves problems that are relevant to it and that would otherwise be left to the administration, • group members share and better coordinate their repetitive functions, • setting group goals and group work strengthens the sense of teamwork, • workers acquire new skills and knowledge and develop more cooperative attitudes.
5. Standardization
In order to achieve the Quality - Cost - Delivery (QCD) objectives, a company must adequately manage the resources it has. These resources are made up of labor, information, equipment and facilities, and materials. Managing resources efficiently on a daily basis requires standards.
The standards have a series of aspects that we can consider key, they are:
• They are the best, easiest and safest way to do a job.
• They represent the best way to preserve know-how and experience.
• They form the basis on which to measure performance.
• Show the cause-effect relationship in the processes and activities.
• They are the basis on which to work with a view to maintenance and improvement.
• They form a base on which to carry out the training.
• They create a base to audit and diagnose the progress of the processes and the company.
• They serve to avoid the recurrence of failures and errors, and reduce the degree of process variability.
6. Move
Resources in each process add value or do not. Muda refers to any activity that does not generate value or produce waste. There are seven classic molts being them:
1. Overproduction molt.
2. Inventory move.
3. Muda for reprocessing and rejection of defective products.
4. Move of movement.
5. Processing molt.
6. Waiting move.
7. Transport change.
The organization through the management and its advisers, the sectors in charge of the various processes and the individually considered workers must be vigilant in detecting the various changes, their prevention and elimination.
Overproduction molt
The waste of overproduction can be defined as "producing what is unnecessary, when it is unnecessary, and in unnecessary quantity." The overproduction molt is the worst of all forms of waste. Contributes to the retention and waste of stock. More inventory leads to greater internal transportation, higher financial and opportunity costs, and obsolescence costs, among others.
Inventory move
Inventory is anything located at the factory's internal or external retention points. Some of these held items are stored inventories and some others are in-process inventory. Wasteful inventory should be understood to include not only warehouse inventory, but also in-process or out-of-warehouse inventory, such as materials, parts, assembled parts, and any items stacked at retention points located at or between process stations. Kaizen views this entire inventory as symptoms of a sick factory. Just as doctors see fever, fatigue, and lightheadedness as a typical symptom of the flu, kaizen and just-in-time specialists see inventory as a symptom of poor health in company operations.
Reprocessing and rejection of defective products
Defects cause waste in themselves and lead to the waste that follows until someone corrects the cause of the defect. Additionally, they disrupt the normal flow of items and have a major impact on productivity.
Movement molt
Any movement of a person's body that is not directly related to adding value is wasteful.
Processing molt
As much in the technology of the processes, as of the products or services we find waste of processing. Distant access or over-processing of the machine, unproductive actuation of the press, and removal of chips remaining when drilling a sheet are all clear examples of processing shedding that can and should be avoided.
Waiting move
Also called idle time wastage, it is a broad term that includes the idle times of people and machines and covers a wide variety of cases. Dead time, waiting, or idle time is generally time wasted waiting for something.
Internal transport move
It is the result of inadequate layout, material handling and the movement of things from one place to another.
All these changes constitute unproductive costs. So we have then:
• Unproductive costs for excess production
• Unproductive costs in the time of workers and / or stopped machines
• Unproductive costs for internal transportation
• Unproductive costs of the processing itself
• Unproductive costs for excess inventories
• Unproductive costs for the generation of defective products and services
• Unproductive costs generated by unnecessary movements
By eliminating these unproductive costs completely, the company can improve its operating profitability by a wide margin.
7. Hidden waste checklist
1. Is there a place for everything and everything is in its place?
2. Are stocks held there that have been unused for a long time or will not be used immediately?
3. Are there visual aids / checks in each process that identify how operations should be performed, that limit production volumes to what is immediately needed in the next process in the chain, and that provide operators with clear and do you need
4. Are there mechanisms in the equipment that eliminate the opportunity for production and / or assembly errors?
5. Are only a few minutes spent preparing the equipment and changing the tooling for the production of a product or part other than the previous one?
6. Is a drag system used for the movement and control of materials and components?
7. Do you have preventive maintenance procedures in place for all teams that clearly deploy autonomous maintenance operations to be performed by operators?
8. Do the operators participate in the continuous improvement of the processes, in the definition of procedures and are they responsible for the results?
9. Do waste, redone work, and defects normally occur?
10. Are the workloads of all operators approximately the same?
8. The five S
The five S constitute a fundamental activity and strategy for the survival of the company. The deep implementation of the five S's is the starting point for the development of improvement activities aimed at achieving the competitiveness of the company. These five S are made up of pillars, being these pillars the ones that jointly support the company's system. The five pillars are defined as Organization, Order, Cleanliness, Standardized Cleanliness and Discipline. The two most important elements are Organization and Order. The success of improvement activities depends on both. Organization and Order are in fact the foundation for achieving zero defects, cost reductions, safety improvements, and zero accidents.
Imagine for a moment a factory or service company whose employees or operators work without caring in the midst of dust, dirt and oil. The staff working at this factory consider finding parts, supplies and tools a part of their jobs. Workers who know where to find missing or missing items are highly valued.
These conditions clearly indicate a factory that produces a large number of defective articles, that systematically fail to deliver, and whose productivity and morale are low.
The five pillars seem like a simple concept and therefore people tend to underestimate them, yet a clean and painstaking factory:
• It produces fewer defects.
• Better meet deadlines.
• It is much safer.
• And it has higher productivity.
The Organization implies removing from the workplace all those elements that are not necessary for current operations. The Organization means leaving only what is strictly necessary: if you have doubts about anything, the slogan is "discard it". This principle is a key part of the Organization in the context of the five pillars.
The implementation of the first pillar creates a working environment in which space, time, money, energy and other resources can be managed and used more effectively. When the Organization is well implemented, problems and inconveniences in workflow are reduced, communication between workers is improved, product quality is increased, and productivity is increased.
The Order involves placing or locating the necessary elements so that they are easy to use and labeling them so that anyone can find them and take them for their use. Order is important because it eliminates many types of waste in production or office activities. These include wastage of searches, due to the difficulty of using items, and due to the difficulty of returning them. The waste of time invested in searches is something that occurs very frequently both in factories and offices.
Cleaning can be defined as keeping everything swept and clean. One of the most obvious purposes of Cleaning is to make the workplace a clean, polished place where everyone can work at ease. Another key purpose is to keep everything in optimal condition, so that when someone needs to use something, it is ready for use. Cleaning should be deeply rooted in daily work habits so that tools, equipment and work areas are ready for use at all times. When equipment and facilities are cleaned, they are also inspected. As a consequence, Cleaning also means inspection.
Standardized Cleaning can be defined as the state that exists when the first three pillars - Organization, Order and Cleaning - are properly maintained.
The fifth pillar is Discipline, and this implies having the habit of correctly maintaining the appropriate procedures. Without Discipline the implantation of the first four abutments quickly deteriorates. The implementation of the first four pillars makes the task more pleasant in the workplace, making it more satisfactory and significantly improving communication between the members of the work team.
9. Visual or Transparent Management
Problems must be made clearly visible, because if they cannot be detected, no one can handle the processes. Therefore, the first principle of visual management is to make problems stand out. If visual management's first reason for existence is to make problems visible, the second is to help both workers and supervisors stay in direct contact with the reality of the workplace.
Visual management is a useful method to determine when everything is under control and to emit an alert voice at the moment when an anomaly or irregularity occurs. When visual management works, all people are able to contribute to the control and improvement of the company's processes.
Graphs by sectors, graph of statistical process control, paretian graph, andon, painted areas (five S), indicator strategy (five S), visual controls (five S) are some examples that allow visual management.
Observe the cleanliness of the sector and of the machines; see the location of tools, materials, finished and in-process products, and the quantity of them; observe the evolution of the levels of quality and productivity of each process through statistical control; see the Pareto chart with the identification by degree of importance of the main problems by quantity and economic cost; verify in each sector the level of absenteeism, the number of suggestions and the participation in the Quality Control Circles; these are just some of the aspects that allow a rapid diagnosis of the state of the company and its processes.
One of the fundamental purposes of visual management is to make clear the objectives of improvement. Suppose that the market situation forces a plant to reduce costs within the next two months. In this case, an exhibition poster is posted in the various sectors of the plant, disclosing the current costs and the total cost to be reached. Every week, information about the time elapsed and the savings obtained must be provided through said poster. For this, it is essential to provide special training to workers to help achieve the objective. The ultimate goal of improvement is part of the senior management policy. One of its functions is to establish medium and long-term policies, as well as annual policies,and make them visible to employees. These policies are displayed at the entrance to the plant, as well as in the workplace.Kaizen activities gain meaning in the minds of staff as they understand that their activities are related to corporate strategies. In this way, visual management helps to identify problems and highlight discrepancies between objectives and current reality, becoming a means of motivating staff towards achieving managerial objectives.
10. Cost reduction. Kaizen costs
Kaizen costs mean maintaining current cost levels for manufactured products or services produced, while working systematically to reduce those costs to desired levels.
There are two types of kaizen costs:
a) Kaizen cost activities of specific departments or plant programmed for each activity period.
b) Kaizen cost activities for product models or types of services, carried out as special projects with emphasis on added value.
A kaizen cost system encompasses the company's management accounting system and its kaizen activities program (JIT, TQM, TPM, etc.).
The primary goal of kaizen costs is the persistent pursuit of cost reductions at every stage of manufacturing, marketing, service, logistics, and administration, to help make profit goals feasible. The kaizen cost system is a cost reduction system that aims to lower current costs by pushing them to be below standard costs.
In the kaizen cost system:
• New cost reduction goals are established each month; These goals are designed to bridge the gaps between the target benefits and the estimated benefits.
• Kaizen activities are performed at all times to achieve cost reduction goals.
• Analyzes of the differences between the target and actual costs are performed.
• Investigations are conducted and corrective measures are taken when cost reduction goals are not achieved.
The fundamental steps to carry out a kaizen cost system for each business period include:
a) Preparation of the budget and determination of the magnitudes of costs to be reduced.
b) Kaizen cost activities to be carried out.
c) Measurement and analysis of the lags between current and target costs.
The best way to reduce costs is to eliminate the excessive use of resources. To effectively reduce costs, the following seven activities must be carried out simultaneously:
1. Improve quality.
2. Improve productivity.
3. Reduce inventory.
4. Shorten the production line.
5. Reduce idle time on machinery.
6. Reduce space.
7. Reduce the total cycle time.
11. Cultural change
Making kaizen feasible involves creating a cooperative atmosphere and culture. All kaizen programs have one key prerequisite in common: gaining worker acceptance and overcoming resistance to change. To achieve this it has been necessary:
• A continuous effort to improve human relationships.
• Train and educate workers.
• Develop informal leaders among workers.
• Training of small group activities such as Quality Control Circles.
• Support and recognition for workers for their effort to carry out kaizen.
• Conscious effort for continuous improvement of the workplace.
• Improve discipline.
• Improvement of horizontal and vertical communication.
• Make social life at work an improvement objective.
12. The practice of kaizen
Kaizen is practiced by both the administration with its managers and professionals, members of quality control or waste disposal circles, and individuals. The goal of the administration is the improvement of the processes, systems and procedures at the company level, while the groups such as the Quality Control Circles have as their goal the improvement within the same workshop, and the workers pursue the improvement of their particular work area.
Among the tools used are the Seven Classic Management Tools; the New Seven Tools, the series of Five why? successive, the Six Fundamental Questions (what, how, when, where and why), the detection and analysis of Bottlenecks, the PREA (Plan - Perform - Evaluate - Act) Cycles and EREA (Standardize - Perform - Evaluate - Act), and the Problem Solving and Decision Making system.
A fundamental tool consists of setting metrics for the improvement process. This implies the determination of concepts to be improved (example: delivery time, quality, productivity, costs); the unit of measurement to be used for each case (days for the delivery period, number of failures for quality, man-hours for productivity, monetary units for average cost per product); current values; the objectives to be pursued; the percentage of improvement; and the person responsible for each item.
A critical review of the conventional production system provides insight into the basic shortcomings of the usual improvement in production management and opens new directions for future progress.
13. Conclusions
If the employer expects continuous improvement to be a lasting process, he has to make sure that he and all employees understand that this is an endless journey, and that they need to be fully involved. Employees cannot be expected to work efficiently in the improvement process unless they clearly understand the kind of waste they must strive to eliminate. On the other hand, since it is impossible to reach the final summit, employees must understand that every day is an opportunity to take a step in the right direction.
Although employees have unlimited opportunities to improve workplaces, most companies or organizations tend to believe that "further improvements are impossible." However, substantial improvements can always be made in the workplace by changing perspectives and approaches.
The continuous improvement cycle employers must work on is not about installing expensive new equipment, but rather about rolling out continuous improvements to existing processes. Over time, this approach begins to change the face of the company and the way of thinking about how to manage production and services. The process consists of continually striving to raise product quality and customer satisfaction through a set of small, persistent changes, the kind of changes that focus on the total elimination of waste.
Long gone are the days when a company could set up a workshop, make a good product and then exploit that product for years, riding on its original competitive advantage. Adaptation, innovation and flexibility have knocked that old business approach off its pedestal and become the must-have ingredients for survival. Sustaining organizational behavior requires an essential attribute: the ability to learn. Hansei represents responsibility, self-reflection, and organizational learning. Without hansei it is impossible to have kaizen. Hansei is a way of thinking, an attitude. This implies that it is necessary to learn through constant reflection (hansei) to make continuous improvement (kaizen) feasible.
A systematic kaizen program helps to increase company profits, increasing quality in a way that exceeds that of competitors, and drastically reducing costs and delivery time. In today's competitive environment, it is more important than ever that all company employees not only perform their assigned work conscientiously, but also actively participate in kaizen activities.
14. Bibliography
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Maynard. Industrial Engineer's Manual. McGraw Hill Publishing. 2005.
Kaizen. Masaaki Imai. CECSA Editorial. 1999.
Japanese accounting methods. Yasuhiro Monden and Michiharu Sakurai. Pruductivity. 1993.
The keys to Toyota's success. Jeffrey Liker. Management 2000.
Cost reduction systems. Kaizen costs. Mauricio Lefcovich. www.consultoralefcovich.com. 2011.
Kaizen. Mauricio Lefcovich. www.gestiopolis.com. 2003.
Costs reduction. Mauricio Lefcovich. www.monografias.com. 2003.
