KAizen 101

Kaizen Masterclass: Simple, Effective Improvement If you dont know how to do almost anything these days, one of the most popular range of books to reach for is the for Dummies series. Whatever it is you need to know about: how to use PowerPoint, how to draw, how to grow vegetables there are 1487 titles available to you from Amazon (UK). Now have you ever thought about the title? These books are for dummies and in life and business it is always the smart people (and this does not always mean the intelligent ones) who achieve the greatest returns. And so it is with the implementation of Kaizen techniques into any organisation large, small, public, private, profit or not-for profit. The smart ones will live and breathe it, getting the best from their people and resources, giving the best to their customers and getting the best returns! So meet smart Company B and not so smart Company A: At Company A, pretty much the same things happen day in and day out. You can see their employees come in and see them go out. Customer orders arrive and goods despatch. Invoices go out and payments come in. Calls come in and issues are handled. Some customers are satisfied and most are not. And most of this happens most of the time. Heart-warming, isnt it? On the other side of town, down the street, or maybe right across the road live and thrive Company B. Watch what is going on there: Employees arrive early, fired up and ready to start, keen to make certain that each customer order goes out on time, in full and with perfect quality. If there are any problems they are empowered to stop the process and work with their colleagues to identify and fix the issues. Customers get what they want, when they want it. Prices are competitive, cycle times are short. Customers are delighted, managers lead, employees are happy and engaged! So which company do you want to be working for? Which company would your customers like to be working with and buying from? Which company are you? Whats the difference? At first glance there may be some obvious differences. Could you copy them? Maybe. But Company B would always stay ahead because they continue to make small differences and incremental improvements everyday which compounded over time make up those significant differences. Everyone in Company B is focused on making every day better than yesterday. Its in their DNA! Continuous improvement lives from the board room to the shop floor, to the offices, to the call centre, never being at peace with the status quo, constantly striving for excellence and everybody doing their best. Reward systems focus on process and results making sure that day in and day out everyone performs at their best for their customers, employees and stakeholders. Well come back to A and B later to see how they are getting on. Excuses, excuses! Some of the common excuses and misconceptions used to avoid applying any continuous improvement method are:

This needs months of preparation Its only for large companies, isnt it?

It wouldnt work in our industry o r business These ideas take too long to give me a return on investment

Now let those myths be gone! Let them vanish right now and replace them with these truths: Kaizen is a simple and effective improvement approach. You dont need months and months of pre paration to implement it. But you do need to be fully engaged as leaders. The Kaizen philosophy and methods have been established for decades with significant impacts in organisations both large and small. It is an underlying principle of Lean techniques which have boosted Toyota to the worlds number one car maker, it has been used in small service companies to reduce repair cycle times by over 60%, it has been used to reduce employee accidents to zero. Kaizen tools and principles can be applied in any work environment. Their application is equally applicable to a call centre as they are to a production line, as they are to a sales team, as they are to a board of directors, as they are to your home office, as they are to your own life and family! Returns begin the same week that you deploy! A typical deployment begins with a Kaizen Blitz a hands on training and implementation session that applies the techniques as they are learnt. Improvements to your live processes start right away with immediate benefits in, for example, cycle time reduction, defect elimination and capacity increases. Kai-Zen Defined Kaizen is both a definition and a philosophy. Literally translated from the Japanese: Kai = Change Zen = Good Kai + Zen = Good change, generally interpreted as improvement And because the premise is that this is a never-ending pursuit then we get the phrase continuous improvement. And Kaizen continuous improvement efforts take place daily in organisations committed to the Kaizen philosophy. Its their way of life! Kaizen achieves the results that some other improvement programmes dont because they are completely inclusive, involving employees at every level of a company. It could be the members of a production cell, the triage team from a helpdesk, it could be a sales team, a product development team, it could even be the board of directors or any combination of all of these working together. The concept is that everyone has the opportunity to express their views on the work that affects them and are involved in identifying, testing and implementing improvements. Its a way of life at a Kaizen company! Gemba is another key concept. It means the actual place. So when problems or issues arise, you dont find the team moving into a conference room with slides, PowerPoint and audio conferencing facilities on the other side of the building. No. They get involved in analysing and resolving the issues where they actually take place around the screen of the computer throwing a wobbly, at the order entry desk, in front of the goods on the dock and so on. And the aim of all this? Well it isnt just for the sake of doing it. The ultimate aim is always to keep the customer and their needs in mind. Everything thats done will ultimately improve the product or service whilst

making the lives of the employees more fulfilling by involving them and improving the organisations systems and processes. 3 is the Magic Number! There are so many fantastic quality tools and methods out there, but so often we over complicate and overburden ourselves and our companies with too many of them. We settle on a set of key tools and expect them to be applied warts-and-all to issues that just dont warrant that amount of detailed analysis or length of time. Kaizen is a nutcracker approach to cracking nuts not a sledgehammer for all seasons. This aligns very much with my own philosophy of right tool right place making sure that you apply what is necessary and required in order to improve. So back to how we do this. Now brace yourself, there now follows an exhaustive list of the three essential methods used to achieve a Kaizen breakthrough. Yes, I said three! They are:

5S Elimination of Waste Visual Management

And heres a little more about each below. 5S 5S is just that. Five words all beginning with the letter S and derived from the original Japanese terms, which when put together as a systematic and disciplined approach will immediately start to bring benefits to what you do:

Sort: Go through the workplace and get rid of all the unnecessary things that are lying around and seldom if ever used. End up with just the right tools and materials to do the job. Get rid of the things that have been kept for the last 3 years just in case, shred the paper that has been sat in your recycling pil e for the last 6 months, throw away the magazines that you said you would always read but never have and so on. The first stage is just one big clean up and declutter!

Set in Order: Now go through whats left. How often do you need that stapler? Who really needs access to that manual? Could we share that printer? Things that you need frequently to do the job should be at hand. Those needed every so often could be in a drawer or cabinet. Items needed just time to time and perhaps by others could be in a central storage location somewhere else. The idea here is to categorise use and to organise storage applying general rules for all to follow.

Shine: When you only ever put your precious car through an automatic car wash how do you ever notice that the tyres are wearing, or that the bumper is loose, or that a new spot of rust has appeared on the wheel arch? Cleaning is checking. If like me you handwash your car you will be amazed at all the minor things you notice about your car including that new scratch that some generous soul added for free at the supermarket! And its no different in the Kaizen organisation: cleaning is a regular and individual activity and Im not talking about general facility maintenance Im talking about your immediate work area whether thats a desk with a computer and telephone or a maintenance bay at the local garage and your toolbox. When you adopt a regular (daily) routine for even just 5 minutes per day you begin to notice that the printer is starting to run low on paper, when your calculator is missing, when that important customer order has fallen down the back of your PC!

Standardise: Im not advocating zero tolerance to appropriate workspace personalisation such as family photos or certificates of achievement. But if there was a common way of doing things with a standard set of tools (read this also as equipment) and you had to swap desk for the day or work in another bay then nobody would have to learn new software, a new telephone system, a new way of operating that piece of machinery and so on.

Standardisation is a word that individuals love to hate because they believe there might be a sub-agenda to turn us into clones and automatons! So spend time with your teams getting them to see the benefits of common process, tools, layouts, desk equipment, procedures etc and you will be surprised at the spin off benefits such as sense of pride, improved housekeeping and the evolution of a showcase workplace.

Sustain: Like anything in life, if you start well but finish poorly then none of thegood achieved in the first 4 Ss will continue. I recently met with a company who compared photos of the workplace from before their Kaizen deployment 5 years ago with the photos of just after their Kaizen Blitz and then photos of the same area last week. Sadly, the before photo looked even better than the today photo. Money had been wasted training people and making changes only to let all the improvements quickly disappear because the company and its leaders were not really committed to maintaining the Kaizen way.

Elimination of Waste Back at Company A, not much seems to be going right. In some parts of the business things have to be constantly checked because so many minor mistakes are made. Yet there are some glimmers of hope, department X seems to be doing a pretty good job these days but even so they are still mandated to check everything and really just for the sake of checking because that darn procedure written by Head Office mandates it. Whilst in department Y, the boss is getting really irate because he can never find his team when he needs them; it seems that they are always having to walk to the other side of the building to get the things that they need to finish their work. And in department Z, yet another unhappy customer is calling in, even more angry than they were before they rang because the account information that they entered whilst in the queue seems to have pulled up nothing in the database and he is being asked for all his details again! We get so used to doing things this way or that way just because thats how we do things round here. Well NO MORE! If you want to live the Kaizen way all that has to change and we need some serious elimination of waste and non-value added tasks. What do I mean by non-value added? Well, its probably easier to define what a value added activity is. This is generally accepted in as the customer recognises the value and is willing to pay for it. Surrounding this is the concept that tasks and work change the product towards something that the customer expects. So is time spent helping the customer to chose which options best suit his needs value added or non-value added? Is having the customer on the line for 40 minutes, handing her off three times to other agents and then still deciding that you will have to call her back value added or non-value added? I think you get the idea. Company B have learnt these lessons and here is the list of 7 deadly sins that they have dealt with so effectively:

1. Waste of overproduction. Put simply, making or doing things that are not required by customers now.

2. Waste of waiting time. Just hanging around waiting for that report or data to arrive so that you can get on with your work. 3. Transportation waste. This refers to physical items and data. For example sending the forms that arrive in Southampton up to Manchester for processing. 4. Processing waste. Having to spend 30 minutes processing a loan application when it could (with minor process flow changes) be completed in under 10 minutes. 5. Inventory waste. Having too many of the wrong thing in stock and not enough of the right things. 6. Waste of movement. This refers to the physical movement of people because of poor layout of the office, having to always go upstairs to visit important coworkers and so on. 7. Waste of producing defects. Just the time and effort wasted producing the things that you make incorrectly reports, quotations, order entry, system installations etc. instead of right first time. These are just a few examples of the different categories of waste but look around. I bet you can see some of these things going on right now in your team, office, factory or call centre. How would it be for you, your employees and most importantly your customers if you took action now to eliminate these drains on your most valuable assets!

So now onto the final essential. Visual Control No wonder company A is producing so many mistakes. Yesterday I visited their service centre and there is no way of telling the good parts from the bad. Just a little housekeeping would make such a difference to their spare parts storage good parts in a green box and bad parts in a red box. Just the colours themselves would draw attention to whats going on. And in the new business team I uncovered one of the reasons for all those lost tenders there is no simple checklist that the person sealing down the box can read to know whether everything is ready to go or not. It seems that they are often sending incomplete sets of documents for the most valuable opportunities! Visual control mechanisms give you information at a glance helping to know whats good or bad, ready to go or not, checked or unchecked. It doesnt have to be complicated in fact the simpler, the better but it is all about telling you or others the status of something without the need for words, phone calls or complex instructions. Think about what you need to communicate in your work place. What essential information is required and where? Think about the how and how often (it needs to be updated that is). Make sure somebody knows who is responsible for upkeep of Back at company B theyve implemented some simple and innovative visual control solutions. Their workshops are using shadow boards so that they can immediately see when specialist tools are missing. The finance team use a simple countdown clock to show the number of days to month end, the call centre use a colour coded chart to indicate holidays and training for each team member, and the software team reports code test status through a real set of traffic lights! Visual control is a powerful and integral element of Kaizen. It links directly to the last 2 Ss so that people know how information is communicated and what it means in sustaining the gains. Be creative, stay relevant and keep things simple. So why bother?

You dont have to. You can just continue to do what youve always done but youll get the results that youve always got! And if you dont want to bother with improvement, dont worry about it your competitors will!! And if you think that everythings already under control then remember that up to80% of all processes add no customer value!!! So take on board that these are simple, straightforward techniques that can be easily learnt and applied throughout your company. It doesnt matter what type of industry you are in or what company structure you have call centre, legal advice, shop, workshop, project management, public, private or even charity. The tools and methods can be universally applied. And if youre still concerned then remember that small changes (with big benefits) can be easily reversed if you really believe that they arent working!!! Now what happened to companies A and B? Well, Company A continued in its ways, creating poor quality products with a demoralised workforce, constantly losing dipped, costs were cut, jobs lost and eventually they sold their business to a group of venture capitalists who could see some potential for asset stripping. Company B on the other hand continued to thrive. It won a Best Employer award, a Business Excellence award, it was constantly sending key note speakers to conferences, new customers were seeking out their products because the quality was so good, sales rose year on year, costs reduced, employee moral was constantly high and turnover was minimal. Now where would you rather be working??? Kaizen What Next? At Kaizen Training we are experienced Change Leaders. Over recent years our consultants have saved millions of pounds for organisations around the world (and in real cash too!). If you want complex solutions we can do that for you, but our strength is in working with our clients to tailor the solution to their situation now. We believe in a holistic approach to change and our skills and abilities extend into personal change, influence, communication, leadership, coaching and more. If you are intrigued to know how we can help you and your organisation move towards your future perfect without overload then email me: james@kaizentraining.com or call me on +44 (0)7785 391149.

+ http://www.argusleader.com/article/20130116/BJNEWS07/130219031/Companies-use-kaizenimprove !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!