Currently, a lot of businesses are launching and competing with each other. The better one will acquire customers’ attention and have opportunities to grow more. Also, some businesses still have a chance to succeed as long as they’re willing to develop and enhance their products. Today, we’re presenting the Kaizen strategy to develop your business and succeed more.

Let’s get to know the concept of Kaizen

Kaizen is the Sino-Japanese word that stands for ‘Continuous Improvement. It’s a strategy for business activities which used to manage employees at all levels of an organization working together as a team to be more efficient. Many people tend to misunderstand this concept, like using Kaizen to diminish the expense by reduction of staff to improve overall efficiency. In fact, the core of Kaizen is not optimization, but it’s considering ‘respecting people’. If system developers don’t take into account the human factor, they won’t be able to produce good results in the long term. However, applying Kaizen in the workplace has to be patient. The change would be implemented on a small scale, and it would take time to develop. 

How to implement Kaizen  

A common Kaizen can be done by these 5 stages. First, you have to set goals and prepare for important background information. Second, check the present state of your business, and create improvement plans. Next, put those plans into action. Then review feedback, and improve faults. Finally, report the outcome, and identify follow-up stuff. 

Using PDCA

• Plan: create hypotheses, brief processes, and goals
• Do: test the methods that you initially plan
• Check: rate the results in order to know if the plans are effective enough
• Act: modify the most suitable plans, and begin the new one

How does Kaizen work?

One of the most essential factors that affect Kaizen is the engagement of all employees of every department in the company. It’s not just about a boss assigning work and commanding his subordinates, but every individual should be able to express and exchange opinions, ideas, feedback, complaints, or recommendations. Owing to collective responsibility, it helps the whole organization grow. Moreover, encouraging employees is necessary since it makes them become more productive and alert. 

The benefits of Kaizen

Kaizen’s profits are not only limited to manufacturing sectors but also any industry can get advantages if Kaizen is properly implemented in the organization. 

Here are some benefits that your company can get:

• Increase profits, productivity, capability, and customer satisfaction
• Improve safety and the quality of product and service
• Minimize cost and amount of waste
• Save time management
• Solve the problem better and easier

How does Kaizen different from other strategies

Kaizen was designed to reduce waste and errors just like agile (read about agile HERE). However, Kaizen is a little bit different in that it focuses on small improvements that are easy to implement. Kaizen indicates the issues that are not specific to the projects. It does not mainly focus on fixing, but it focuses on creating the work atmosphere for everyone to accept the mistakes and grow from their experience. In addition, Kaizen would focus more on employees’ feedback rather than customers’ feedback. The suggestions mostly come from the employees in the company as it can embed a co-operative in a company.

In short, every company needs to find a way to enhance its efficiency whether it is the work performance of employees or the unity of the organization. Hence, Applying Kaizen can help you to work wiser and better. Significantly, your company will keep improving. If you want to know more, you check out https://www.getunstuckmethod.com 

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