Term of Process Continuous Improvement maybe sound strange for some people. Because these term actually not many say at the local newspaper or television. Nonetheless for an employee that works at the factory these terms is very familiar. Because his boss always push him to do Process Continuous Improvement. In other word Process Continuous Improvement means Kaizen.
So what is Kaizen or Process Continuous Improvement means? Many technical book outside define those word. I will resume shortly. Every effort to enhance from current condition to better condition is kaizen or Process Continuous Improvement. Why should we do that? Because our responsibility to give the best value of our product to the customer. If we lazy to do kaizen or Process Continuous Improvement then we will leave behind by our competitor. Means we have no business. So whatever our condition. Kaizen is a must to keep our business survive.
From the book which I read from Maasaki Imai I have obtained some interesting fact about Process continuous improvement or the kaizen. The fact is in Japan public, kaizen term or Process continuous improvement is common word to be told in daily life. All TV and newspaper many times mentioning these words in everyday context including governmental functionary. So obviously if kaizen or process improvement became a real very strong culture or habits in Japan. On the other side like explained by the books above if in America nor European countries initially fairly not recognizes term kaizen very well. They are more recognizing big innovation term or jumping movement or quantum movement. From their point of view continuous improvement or kaizen not more than like small steps of innovation which the effect often not directly seen. Lately - from the same books - They cooperated with their Japan principal to adopt kaizen soul and implement at the shop floor.
I have just write down in paragraph two that kaizen or process continuous improvement are all activity which must take to improve current standard to become a better standard. The keyword here is standard. What is standard anyway? Standard are sets of rule which have been specified for machine, tools, material and man that you must obey in order to get a good quality product with efficient, low cost consistently. Remember consistently. It means we can do the activity over and over with same result. The first step before doing kaizen or process continuous improvement are determining value standard for a basis point of improvement. If current condition there is no value standard then you must create one for current condition. That is the easy way as a starting point.
Why we should do standardization before doing kaizen or process continuous improvement? It is a simple. We can not measure the kaizen or process continuous improvement achievement whether success or not. For example. I have standardized that we need sixth movement to cleaning product properly. So if we have 100 products that we should do 600 movements. So if we can reduce man movement from 6 movements per product become 4 movements per product without reduce in quality then we have succeeded do kaizen or process continuous improvement of man movements. But if we did not specify standard how many man movements to clean the product then we don't know whether 4 man movements are succeeded or not.
We will continue studies of process improvement later. In coming article we will try to study about real Case and any kinds of tools which needed to do Process continuous improvement or kaizen. Hopefully we are always success. Happy kaizen.
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