Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Learn about Kaizen or process continuous improvement

By Agung Adiwijaya

Maybe not all people have ever heard about process continuous improvement. Because this words is seldom enough to be found in newspaper and all audio visual media. Fortunately for man who are working or maybe have ever worked in factory they must be used to with term of process continuous improvement. Because this word has always in purrs to give breathe life spirit into the employees so they can give the best effort. Process continuous improvement is kaizen.

So what is kaizen or process continuous improvement anyway? Kaizen or process continuous improvements are all activity which must take to improve current standard to become a better standard. No need to be a big jump just a little change that would be enough. The keyword is continuous, the never ending activity. Question? Why we should do kaizen. Simple to be answer. Because our competitor did kaizen or process continuous improvement. So if you want to survive in hard and hurts competition there is no excuse to not doing kaizen. The faster you do the better you are. If you did not the kaizen or process continuous improvement then you and your company will be history.

So how popularity this term in the world. Masaaki Imai explained in his book. In Japan, kaizen become their daily life style. Their habits or their culture. So in every news media both paper or audio visual we can easily find these term. So clear enough that kaizen is the real Japanese culture. What about America and European countries? Both of them initially prefer doing big innovation than kaizen. Kaizen or Process Continuous Improvement they assumes does not generate a big impact to the current condition. Lately still from the book. They enjoy kaizen or Process Continuous Improvement. They learn much from their Japan principal to implement kaizen properly on the shop floor.

I have explained above that kaizen or Process Continuous Improvement is every effort to enhance from current condition to better condition. The keyword here is current condition or we can say standard condition. Standard are sets of rule to control process activity including machine, material, tool, environment and man itself. Those standard items are needs to get process safely, efficient with good quality consistently. So obviously we need standard first before doing kaizen or process continuous improvement. What if there is no standard of current process? Simply, just find good condition at the process and make it as standard. So we can start from that point.

Why we must have to standardize first before we want to do Process continuous improvement or kaizen? Because if there is no standard hence would be difficult for us to measure the level of success from kaizen which we have done. For example: We set standard to make one goods units is 2 minutes. Hence if lately our Process continuous improvement or kaizen are success so we can reduce process time to make goods become 1 minute, hence we successfully lessens reducing time 50 % from initial time. But, if there is no standard time to make one goods unit then difficult for us to judge whether our process improvement were success 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.

About the Author:

No comments: