What does KAIZEN mean?

Mr. masaaki imai, the author of "Improvement-the Key to the Success of Japanese Enterprises", believes that the key to Toyota's success lies in implementing Kaizen's business philosophy. Kaizen is a Japanese word that means small, continuous and gradual improvement. This method means that enterprises can continuously motivate employees by improving a series of detailed activities in the production and operation process, such as continuously reducing non-value-added activities such as handling, eliminating waste of raw materials, improving operating procedures, improving product quality and shortening product production time. The function of the product and the target cost of each department of the enterprise determined in the design process are the basis of cost control in the process of product manufacturing and sales. In this process, enterprises can use improvement to gradually reduce costs, so as to achieve or exceed this goal and reach the predetermined profit level in stages and in a planned way. Because of this, masaaki imai once wrote appreciatively: "It is a pleasing thing to watch the Toyota production system in operation. Workers adopt four working principles: cleaning, sorting, screening and neatness ... Toyota's assembly plant has a lively atmosphere, and every action has a clear purpose and is not lazy. In a normal factory, you will see piles of unprocessed parts, the assembly line stops for inspection, and the workers stand there doing nothing. In Toyota, the production process is like a design dance, and the workers look like dancers: picking up parts, installing parts, checking quality ... all this is done in a perfect environment.

Kaizen seems to be tinkering around the edges, keeping things quiet. However, compared with the explosive innovative ideas, even the trivial and subtle effects brought by Kaizen's ideas are often subversive and revolutionary in the end. It requires every manager and operator to constantly improve their work at a relatively small cost. In the long run, this gradual and continuous progress is enough to get huge returns. At the same time, Kaizen is also a low-risk way, because in the process of improvement, managers can return to their original working methods at any time without paying the price. In this sense, the core idea of Toyota Kaizen production mode, as a lean production system that does not do useless work, is nothing more than two points. The first is "eliminating waste" (that is, effective cost control), and the second is "continuous improvement" (from Deming's idea of "continuous quality improvement", that is, the improvement of products and processes is regarded as a process that never stops and makes slight progress continuously).

Taiichi Ono once expounded his understanding of improvement in the classic book "Toyota Mode of Production", which comprehensively revealed Toyota's core competitiveness. He said: "completely eliminating waste" is the basic concept of Toyota's production mode. The two pillars that run through it are timeliness and automation. "Because in the middle of the last century, the ratio of industrial productivity in Japan and the United States was one to nine, which is still an average. If compared with the United States, where the automobile industry is the most developed, there will be more than this gap. Both Taiichi Ono and Akio Toyoda, then president of Toyota, clearly realized that there must be huge waste in the Japanese production process. In other words, as long as waste is eliminated, productivity may increase by 10 times. This idea is the starting point of Toyota's current production model. As for the two pillars of this concept, "just-in-time system" means that in the process of assembling a car through an assembly line, the required parts are sent to the production line in the required time and quantity. In this way, the "inventory" problem that burdens the management in terms of materials and finance can almost be solved. And "automation" refers to "machines with automatic parking devices". This idea comes from the automatic loom invented by Akio Toyoda, the founder of Toyota. When a warp yarn is broken or a weft yarn is used up, his automatic loom can stop running immediately. Because it is equipped with a "device that enables the machine to judge the state", there will be no defects. Similarly, once human wisdom is given to machines, it means that the meaning of management will change dramatically. Because no one is needed when the machine is running normally, only people are needed to deal with it when the machine stops running abnormally. So one person can manage several machines; With the gradual reduction of personnel, the production efficiency will be greatly improved.

We have also noticed that Toyota-style improvement has done enough articles on "customer-oriented" and "demand is king". As Taiichi Ono wrote in his book: "Only by making ineffective labor (waste) zero and making the work ratio close to 100% can we really improve efficiency. Toyota's mode of production pursues on-demand production. Therefore, it is necessary to reduce personnel to match the excess capacity with the required output. " Therefore, in order to maximize the improvement effect, the first task is to thoroughly expose the phenomenon of ineffective labor and waste, and remove it in time. These phenomena include: overproduction of ineffective labor; The waiting time is wasted; Invalid transport labor; Ineffective labor and waste of processing itself; Inventory waste; Ineffective labor in action; Ineffective labor and waste in manufacturing defective products, and so on. Here, the enlightenment of Toyota-style improvement is that it is meaningful for enterprises to improve efficiency only by reducing costs. To this end, we must work towards producing only the required number of products with the least number of people; With regard to efficiency, we should focus on each operator and the production line they organize, and then focus on the whole factory centered on the production line. Every link should be improved to achieve the overall effect.

Of course, from Toyota-style Kaizen management, we can often vaguely see the shadows of several other business ideas. For example, Taiichi Ono advocates breaking through the traditional concept of "having inventory" and insisting on the concept of "zero inventory", much like Michael? 6? 1 Dell (Dell Computer) strategic approach, the latter adopts direct sales, which can bypass sellers to reduce prices and improve product competitiveness, and secondly, it can directly face customers and understand their needs; For another example, the "Kanban" management adopted by Toyota (that is, sticking a standard work order on the side of the parts box transported to the production line, on the one hand, it means getting the necessary things at the necessary time to remind the actual process of processing parts, on the other hand, it plays the role of work instruction) is taken from the supermarket management model in the United States, and customers here only buy goods from supermarkets and replenish similar goods in time according to the purchased quantity, without knowing when they can sell them.

It is this kind of Kaizen that also integrates the management ideas of total quality management (TQM), just-in-time production system (JIT) and total production maintenance (TPM), which has become Toyota's corporate philosophy and will continue to lead Toyota to make steady progress. When Toyota's brand expansion and continuous progress provide a reference for the global automobile manufacturing industry, and when Kaizen is regarded as the clearest, simplest and fastest way to maximize production and optimize quality, will Toyota's production mode become the mainstream choice of "no road is suspicious, there is a road where there is Toyota" like Toyota? Taiichi Ono's firmness gave us confidence. He said, "If Henry, the American automobile king? 6? If 1 Ford had seen it before his death, he would have adopted the Toyota production method.