1. HISTORY Toyota Motor Company was one of the first Japanese businesses to implement Kaizen.

After World War II, Kaizen was adopted by several Japanese companies to help rebuild after the war. Since this time, kaizen has become so successful, that it has spread to several businesses throughout the world.

2. MEANING Kaizen is the Japanese strategy for Continuous improvement process. in western culture. In order to be successful with continuous process improvement, your company must be willing to work hard at inspiring everyone within the organization. You all need to work together to achieve a better way of understanding how the different processes within your organization work and what you can do to make them better. Your company must require a change in its employees instead of merely accept the continuous process improvement methodology. If you just accept continuous process improvement, and don't actually do anything within your company, you will notice the small problems will continue to get worse.. The main goal of kaizen is to eliminate waste. The kaizen approach focuses on continuous improvement in all aspects of life. For a business; the kaizen approach works at continually improving all the functions of a company from the CEO down to the assembly line of workers.

3. APPLICATION How kaizen APPROCH works in business??? Kaizen calls for never-ending methods of improvement. It goes beyond simply improving productivity. Kaizen is a process and if it is done correctly, it will help to humanize the workplace, eliminate hard work, and will teach people how to perform to the best of their abilities and reduce waste in the manufacturing process. The 3 principles of kaizen. Kaizen has 3 main principles that must be implemented if it is to operate properly. First, you must consider the process and the results. The process and results will surface the actions needed to achieve the correct results. Second, you must have a systematic thinking of the entire process instead of just the immediate problems. This is simply to avoid creating or missing problems in other parts of the process. Third, you need to approach kaizen with a non-judgmental, non-blaming, and learning method. This allows for the re-examination of assumptions that were part of the current process.

Everyone in the company needs to adopt the 3 principles of kaizen in order to make it work. Kaizen can be formatted individually, within a small group, a large group, or as a suggestion system. Kaizen works by making changes and monitoring the results and then making necessary adjustments. Obviously, the Toyota Production System is known for using kaizen. Within Toyota, all personnel is expected to stop moving production lines if there is any slight notification of abnormalities. The employee is then expected to suggest an improvement to resolve the abnormality (this initiates kaizen)

4. Real life example of

The Hotel Taj President, Mumbai - part of the Rs 687 crore Indian Hotels Corporation Ltd (IHCL) - recently witnessed a peculiar problem at its main kitchen. Breakages in the main kitchen were high due to incorrect flow of cutlery and crockery during washing. The Konkan Cafe and the Thai Kitchen, two restaurants at Taj President, were also facing problems due to the depth of the sink and mixing up of metal and chinaware. The hotel decided to set up a Kaizen team comprising Chef Ananda Solomon, Rajkishore Mahto and Wilfred Rebello who immediately sprung into action. The team studied the problem and set about to rectify it. The system of one piece at a time into the dishwasher was implemented. The layout of the dishwashing area was changed to facilitate single-piece flow. Seemingly frivolous? But the result: The breakage of crockery came down by 28 per cent. Savings from the stoppage of breakages are at Rs 6 lakh per annum. In the main kitchen, gains are around Rs 1.75 lakh per annum and in the Konkan Cafe and Thai Kitchen, the gains are around Rs 2 lakh each. This is not a one-off incident at the Taj group. Over the past two years, the group has institutionalised both the Kaizen approach and the Total Productivity Maintenance (TPM) approach, says IHCL senior vicepresident (corporate quality), Mr HN Shrinivas. Tata Business Excellence Model How is the Kaizen approach applied at Taj President? The whole idea is to create a vibrant selfcorrecting organisation which responds intelligently to changing business conditions. How you understand these changes and define and redefine relationship with your stakeholders customers, stakeholders and employees - is important, says Mr Shrinivas. This is embodied in the Tata Business Excellence Model (TBEM) which all the Tata group companies have adopted. The TBEM model adopted by the Taj group offers the JRD QV Award that is built along the lines of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in the United

Taj Hotel management efforts in implementing kaizen approch.

So how has this whole process been institutionalised in the Taj group? There is an apex council headed by the managing director comprising around 12 people. There is a business council of each strategic business unit (SBU). Each Taj Hotel in India has a quality council headed by a general manager. An average Taj Hotel has around 14 process implementation teams. They report to the quality council of their respective hotels. The quality council in turn reports to the SBU. However, some of the major Taj hotels like the flagship Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, may have up to 20 process implementation teams. These cover every major areas including housekeeping, front office, coffee shop and other facilities. This process, as Mr Shrinivas points out, enables any best practice adopted in any of the hotels to be picked up across the chain. For example, the cross-functional team in Taj Holiday Village, Goa, reorganised room service work floor resulting in a saving of Rs 7 lakh per annum and released 150 sq metre of space where a staff activity centre was set up. The transformation has been marked. Mr Shrinivas pegs the savings at Rs 7.5 crore in the last one year. Indirectly, the savings would add up to around Rs 1520 crore. Mr Shrinivas also plans to achieve savings of Rs 14 crore in the current fiscal directly through this exercise. So next time you have your cup of coffee at one of Taj hotel coffee shops, raise a toast to the team that made it the cup that cheers! 6. The kaizen cycle. Here is how the kaizen cycle of activity works (according to popular businesses): standardize an operation ? measure the standardized operation (find cycle time and amount of in-process inventory) ? gauge measurements against requirements ? innovate to meet requirements and increase productivity ? standardize the new, improved operations ? continue cycle ad infinitum. Several companies call this the Shewhart cycle, PDCA, or Deming cycle. No matter what you call it, the main focus is the same, continuous process improvement. 7..Importance of Kaizen Approach in Current Market Scenario: The challenge of globalization has magnified the economy of most of the developed and developing nations. Globalization has created new complexities in every industry and thus

requires new strategies and unique approaches. Have you ever thought why some countries have higher economic growth rates than others? Or why some industries grow at a faster pace and more constantly than any other industry? Perhaps the answer could be they all believed in constant changes for better improvement in order to survive against the competition. The business world has changed dramatically in the last couple of years and the biggest challenge that most business managers/ entrepreneurs or any business are facing these days is to implement and adopt change programs. The business has become more competitive and no one can deny from the fact that today the requirement to improve the quality and productivity is one of the highest priorities in business management. This is where "Kaizen", comes into picture and plays a vital role. Kaizen has been derived from the fusion of two Japanese words: "Kai" and "Zen", it stands for "Change" and "Good" and defined as nonstop enhancement or improvement. In simple terms it means constant analysis to have a better performance. Invented and developed in Japan, this Kaizen approach helped many firms all across the globe to achieve better operational excellence and improve their productivity.

Designed to achieve better quality at low cost and on- time delivery of products, Kaizen generally focus on defining standards and then repeatedly following those standards to get better and maximum output. This is an approach that strives toward achieving perfection by eliminating waste. Moreover, it encourages a better communication between different departments through Total Quality Management. Apart from this, Kaizen approach also focuses on complete productive maintenance and pay attention on getting the highest utility by effectively utilizing the present technologies. The most important highlight of Kaizen approach is that involves every single employee within an organization starting right from senior managers to the bottom line employees, and makes every person working there, feel the company as something personal. This indirectly helps in improving the individual performance and motivates them to deliver better output. With every employee is looking for ways to make improvements, an effective Kaizen approach can lead to have better results like: 1) It helps in decreasing the waste in areas such as inventory, transportation, and over production. 2) It focuses on discovering problems at their source and solving them at their source, and if in case a situation arises where one needs to change the standards, it further helps in changing the standard so that the problem can be solved. 3) It helps in positive space utilization and better use of production capacity, capital and employee retention.

4) Kaizen can be easily implemented by effective and well planned elimination or transformation of existing procedures 5) It focuses on creative investments and small improvements instead of large capital investments and thus provides immediate results. No doubt if we observe the current market scenario, by following the Kaizen approach any organization can indeed achieve and develop an organized work place with disciplined employees. Making the appropriate and correct use of skills of your employees to further improve the competitiveness can greatly contribute towards the growth of your business; standardize the working culture and measure all possible metrics to attain the best market result. In recent years Kaizen as a new concept has been applied into many organizations, manufacturing and service companies. Thus, if any company is looking to improve its productivity at lower costs, and planning to maintain or achieve a sustainable growth rate, then Kaizen is definitely one of the answers. 8. EXAMPLE OF SOME More Indian firms turn to Kaizen to cut waste

The recent slowdown has seen an increasing number of companies turning towards Kaizen the Japanese approach to business and one of the widely practiced management philosophies throughout the world. The technology, founded by management guru Masaaki Imai for eliminating waste and using leaner processing methods has seen a two-fold increase in inquiries in the last one year and about 25 per cent rise in its Indian business. Kaizen when translated into English means continuing improvements. Two years ago it was difficult to convince a CEO for driving improvements in the organization. Today, however it is time to listen to change in strategy, said Jayant Murthy, one of the three directors of Kaizen Institute India and Africa. The Kaizen Institute was formed in India in 2000 with offices at Delhi, Pune, and Ahmedabad. According to Murthy, the Kaizen approach is in lines with the philosophy of Toyota Motor Corporations, a company that enjoys higher net profit as compared to those of the three top car manufacturing companies in the world. He explained that Kaizen is a business strategy involving everyone, at every level and across every function in the organization, working together. To attain this objective, available tools are used to eliminate all wasteful activities aimed at improving total business performance through sustainable implementation for sustainable profits. The Kaizen Management System addresses all aspects that contribute to company results including quality, costs, logistics, staff motivation, safety, technology and environment. The entire process chain from supplier via the internal customer to the final customer is therefore taken into consideration.In most of the companies,

about 70-80 per cent is waste and this needs to be cut. The difference in cost of conversion after implementing Kaizen process is about 30 per cent while the modest figure for reduction in cost of operation is 6-7 per cent, said Murthy. Kaizen has 30 consultants on board and has catered to over 250 clients including Gujarat government, Reliance Industries, Zydus Cadila, ABB Limited, Bharat Heavy Electrical Limited, Asian Paints, Electrotherm, Federation of Indian Chamber of Commerce, Godrej Consumer Products Limited, Deepak Nitrite, Crompton Greaves, ISPAT Industries, Indian Oil Corporation, Larsen & Toubro Ltd, Navneet Publications, ITC Limited, Sterling Exports, Thermax Limited, Suzlon, Arvind Mills and Raymond Limited. Kaizen helps clients to initiate immediate organizational change by using creative and practical solutions through various Kaizen tools and Total Systems Improvement program, to achieve client specific and on going strategic growth. While Kaizen is frequently thought of in the context of small workshop and activities, KAIZEN Institute uses a strategic approach to help its clients move beyond the techniques with JIT, Kanban System Value Stream Mapping, or even Six Sigma. Zydus has named its Kaizen initiative as Strategic Lean Integrated Management. The company saw some dramatic changes in its generic drug manufacturing facility at Moraiya like its cellular flow capacity rising to 100 million against about 20 million earlier, the distance travelled by a batch reducing drastically and the yield going up to 99.6 percent.

Kaizen events, also known as rapid process improvement events, are a team activity designed to eliminate waste and make rapid changes in the workplace through the targeted use of Lean methods. The strategy aims to involve workers from multiple functions and levels in the organization in working together to address a problem or improve a process. The team uses process improvement methods, such as cellular manufacturing and Total Productive Maintenance, to identify opportunities quickly to eliminate waste in a targeted process or production area. The team also works to implement chosen improvements rapidly (often within 72 hours of initiating the kaizen event), typically focusing on solutions that do not involve large capital outlays. The philosophy of kaizen is often is considered to be the building block of all Lean production methods. Kaizens impressive results often stem from:

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focus on moving rapidly from planning to implementation; focus on making continued progress rather than waiting to find the perfect focus on worker involvement and team work; focus on addressing the root causes of problems; and focus on process improvement from a systems perspective.

The Three Phases of a Kaizen Event

Kaizen events typically require an organization to foster a culture where employees are empowered to identify and solve problems. Most organizations implementing kaizen-type improvement processes have established methods and ground rules that are well communicated in the organization and reinforced through training. Kaizen events generally have three main phases, although organizations can adapt and sequence these activities to work effectively in their unique circumstances. Phase 1: Planning and Preparation To prepare for a kaizen event, a target area and problem are selected. Such areas might include: areas with substantial work-in-progress (WIP); an administrative process or production area where significant bottlenecks or delays occur; and/or areas that have significant market or financial impact (i.e., the most value added activities). A more specific waste elimination problem within that area is then chosen for the focus of the kaizen event. Baseline information is collected for the process area and improvement targets and measures are established. An event leader and a team are carefully selected and trained, making sure to tap a range of expertise, including shop floor workers who are intimately familiar with the targeted process. Phase 2: ImplementationThe Event Implementation focuses on the actual kaizen event, lasting from two to five days, depending on their scope. The facilitated events emphasize worker participation. The first part of an event includes a kickoff and an assessment of the current state of the targeted process and problem so that all team members have a similar understanding of the problem they are working to solve. This part frequently involves process observation, data collection, and process mapping. Team members are assigned specific roles for research and analysis. As more information is gathered, team members add detail to value stream maps of the process and conduct time studies of relevant operations (e.g., cycle time, lead time). The next part focuses on developing, selecting, implementing, and testing improvement ideas. Team members identify and record all observed waste, by asking what the goal of the process is and whether each step or element adds value towards meeting this goal. Once non-value added activity is identified and measured, team members then brainstorm improvement options. Ideas are often tested on the shop floor or in process mock-ups. The most promising ideas are selected and implemented. Phase 3: Presentation and Follow-up Wrap-up and follow-up activities ensure that the results of a kaizen event are communicated and sustained in the organization. Improvements made during an event must be shared with others in the organization, particularly with those affected by changes to standard work. Celebration is also important to recognize team member contributions and to cultivate a culture of worker involvement. Follow-up activities to measure process performance, make adjustments, and ensure that unresolved actions are completed are critical to prevent backsliding.