What exactly is 'Kaizen' and what is a “kaizen workshop”?

Kaizen is a Japanese word which roughly translates to continuous improvement. In the context of Lean manufacturing, kaizen is understood to signify small, incremental, yet frequent improvements to a process. Lean philosophy states that instead of making large changes that may require significant amounts of investment and risk, the kaizen mindset aims to make process improvements without 1) adding people to the process, 2) adding space to the process, and 3) without spending any money to implement the change (this last one is usually the hardest for companies follow).

Gembutsu's approach towards teaching the adoption of the kaizen mindset is by completing so-called kaizen workshops. These are 3-5-day focused efforts by a cross-functional team that focus on implementing changes within a production area. Tasked with a specific objective and scope agreed upon by upper management, the kaizen team must meet all of its objectives by the end of the workshop. The Gembutsu representative's role is to act as teacher to not only achieve savings by the end of the week, but also to ensure that sufficient knowledge-transfer is taking place.

The figure below shows how small incremental improvements can have a large positive impact over time. The pie chart represents a typical process having value-added and non-value added elements. The kaizen activity aims at reducing this non-value added portion of a process. We see that after each kaizen workshop the process is more and more efficient (has less and less non-value added activities).