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Masaaki Imai made the term famous in his book Kaizen: The Key to Japan's Competitive Success. [1] In the Toyota Way Fieldbook, Liker and Meier discuss the kaizen blitz and kaizen burst (or kaizen event) approaches to continuous improvement. A kaizen blitz, or rapid improvement, is a focused activity on a particular process or activity.
Quality circles were at their most popular during the 1980s, but continue to exist in the form of Kaizen groups and similar worker participation schemes. [2] Typical topics for the attention of quality circles are improving occupational safety and health, improving product design, and improvement in the workplace and manufacturing processes.
In 1986, Imai published "Kaizen, The Key to Japan's Competitive Success", which was an instant global bestseller, firmly embedding the word kaizen in the corporate lexicon. It was the first book to introduce the Lean philosophy to the world.
On the other hand, transformational change works best when an enterprise faces a crisis and needs to make major changes in order to survive. In Japan, the land of Kaizen, Carlos Ghosn led a transformational change at Nissan Motor Company which was in a financial and operational crisis. Well organized quality improvement programs take all these ...
Kaizen is based on the involvement of all employees, wherein singular changes typically do not improve major production metrics above a 20% threshold. A cross between Kaikaku and Kaizen is Kaizen Blitz (or Kaizen Events), which targets a radical improvement in a limited area, such as a production cell, typically during an intense week.
The program continued post-war in Europe and Asia, where it aided reconstruction. It is most notable in the business world for inspiring the concept of kaizen in Japan. In addition, the program became the foundation of the Toyota Production System and the DoD resourced open source Management System (3.1).
Reverted to version as of 10:32, 21 February 2013 (UTC); no discussion about this change; in this set of maps disputed areas are always shown in light grey 14:25, 5 April 2020 582 × 580 (726 KB)
Japan is experiencing such an evolution in regard to women in the workplace and in management roles. While a main reason for this evolution is the adoption of western influence on Japanese society, Japan is being forced to support this evolution because it is grappling with a declining population and lower birth rate which will lead to a ...