KaizenKaizen information

5S Implementation Is Truly Worth It
By Randy Hough

5S implementation is one of the smartest things you can do for your business, without a doubt. Your clutter will vanish, you will know where every single thing is in your shop, and everybody will be happier and more productive. What more could you ask for!

Seriously, if you have not made the 5S program part of your daily operation, do it now. There is really no reason to delay, unless you are already highly organized and efficient. It could be that some exceptional manufacturing shop is just naturally that way, it does happen, but rarely.

There are obviously 5 parts to the program, sort, straighten, sweep, standardize and sustain. Once you have understood the concepts and decided to implement them, you will almost immediately see results, really.

How it works in real-life

The first time I was involved in a 5S training program was with a typical American plastic injection molding shop of about 10 mold makers. We had been in business as long as plastic molding was a business, so there was a lot of ” stuff” laying around. It seemed that everything had a place, but only a few knew the secrets of where it all was.

I was highly skeptical of this idea at first because I had spun my wheels for so long on every new program that the managers learned at the latest seminar. Most of these programs just took our time and yielded little or nothing in the way of results. When I heard that it was Japanese, I got interested. At the time, they were decimating our auto industry and I figured they must know something we didn’t.

What do you need to get started?

Not much, mostly time and a will to do it. Once you learn the technique, it is a matter of educating your workers of the benefits and making it a permanent policy. It is essential that the decision come from the top down, otherwise it will be just another well-meaning program.

How long will it take?

It tookus about a week to actually finish the process. By the end of two days we had made a lot of progress, but it was essential that we complete the project entirely. I’m certain that things would have returned to “normal’ if we had not followed all five steps. It is very difficult to change a shop culture, but it can be done.

There were some guys who were very negative, but once they began to see the results their complaints disappeared. Is it worth the effort? Yes, it is very much well worth the effort. The time spent as you implement 5 S will most certainly pay for itself in a short time. If you only added up the hours spent looking for things, you would quickly justify the expense; not to mention the satisfaction you feel from working in a well-organized and efficient environment.

5S is just one part of the lean manufacturing process. It is also essential that everyone follows through, so the benefits can be permanent. It is not enough to paint some outlines of wrenches and then leave them laying about randomly.

Make sure you have your workers involved.

Assign various people to “be in charge” of different areas. They will take pride in the ownership of their work area and watch over it like a watch dog. In this way your shop culture begins to improve and moral will almost instantly improve.

Randy Hough

Plastic Injection Mold Maker

http://www.global-plastic-injection-molding.com

“You know Dad, I’ve been thinkin’, one is a lot more than zero!” my son, Thomas, age 5.

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Kaizen As A Successful Business Management Tool
By Willie Krut

Kaizen is not a procedure, not a document that describes step by step actions of those workers that have been selected to implement it, not just a paper which becomes approved and becomes an official paper. Kaizen is not a methodology or theory like for example a “Strategy Manual” that a lot of companies have.

Kaizen is not a philosophy like some military-oriented companies that require from their employees total loyalty, the desire to implement any order of management even if it will benefit the company or not.

Kaizen is a quality and a religion. Kaizen is the efficiency of quality as a whole. Kaizen’s methods are not just problematic of management or sociology, economy, geopolitics or even psychology. It is a solution of mentality and metaphysics. To answer the question of if it is possible or not, it can only be given you really believe in the importance of quality and are ready to dedicate your time, money, and experience to quality. That kind of attitude got the Japanese workers on all levels into big and small businesses.

In the Japanese language the word “kaizen” means “continuous perfection”.
Based on this strategy all levels of a company are involved in the business process from managers to regular workers. The realization of this process is not that expensive either.
The kaizen philosophy means that all our life (work, social, and private) should be focused on constant improvement. This idea is so natural and obvious to many Japanese, that they follow it, not reflecting on it at all! In my opinion, it causes the competitive success of Japan in a big degree.

Even if the changes based on kaizen are not really that significant, after some time the business gets amazing results. Kaizen explains why the Japanese companies do not stop in their growth. At the same time, in a lot of industrial countries management prefers to do the major innovations: implementing new technology, the newest business management concepts etc. The big innovation assumes fundamental change to which all of the attention is concentrated.

Kaizen most at the time is a quiet process and is not even obvious. However innovation is similar to a single shot and its results are often unclear while the kaizen process is based on common sense and with small expenses provides steady progress which justifies itself in long-term prospects. Kaizen is also the method described by small risk. Managers without big losses can always return back to the old way of business. The majority of “originally Japanese” methods of management and styles like “quality assurance in the scale of the entire company”, “club of quality”, or “general quality assurance” we can describe with the one word kaizen.

Kaizen is the word that needs to be used instead of such fashionable words as “productivity”, “general quality assurance”, “zero defects”, “exactly on time”, and “the system of submission of offers” allows receiving a more precise picture of things that occur in the Japanese industry. Kaizen is an umbrella-type strategy for all kinds of methods that can be added to existing ones based on the specifics of business. New ideas in business should be considered as one of the important principles in their work. Correct approaches and thought over the use of corresponding processes allows any company, no matter where it is, to benefit from kaizen.

To learn more about the kaizen methods of business visit http://www.welcome-to-self-improvement.com/blog/

Willie Krut is the core provider of a selection of self help products that truly help people to improve their life, health and career. Subscribe to the free Willie’s Newsletter, visit the
http://www.welcome-to-self-improvement.com site.

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