The Kaizen is very popular in manufacturing, it is, however, still not so much in office. Unlike the manufacturing environment, seeing waste is pretty hard in the office environment because many wastes in the office are intangible. Although an education for Kaizen is necessary to see the wastes, the Kaizen training is uncommon in the office environment and many office employees cannot see their wastes effectively.
There is another reason why the office Kaizen is uncommon. People in the manufacturing work together in a team. People in the office on other hands work as individuals. Although the office Kaizen with the individuals needs a strong leadership, such leader tends to be very busy, and the Kaizen has much lower priority than their daily tasks.
The organization I belong didn’t have a Kazien event. They did have a problem-solving activity with Lean Six Sigma (DMAIC) after the problem was escalated and being apparent, but the continuous waste elimination with the Kaizen.
But I was able to see many wastes when I looked around the office with the “Seeing Waste” eyes. I was also able to hear many complaining from the managers and the employees in the office when I talked with. There seemed many opportunity for the Kaizen. That was why I started the office Kaizen using the following steps.
1. Interview
Kaizen Box is a popular way to collect a Kaizen idea. The Kaizen boxes are placed at many locations in the building, and the employees post their Kaizen ideas to the boxes. The Kaizen Box is very simple way and effective only when the employees are trained in the Kaizen and the organization has the Kaizen culture. If the organization does not have the Kaizen culture, it is pretty ineffective. The efficiency can be calculated by the number of collected Kaizen ideas divided by the number of days.
Instead of the Kaizen Box, I directly interviewed the managers and the employees in the organization, and collected over 100 Kaizen ideas in a day.
2. Standardizing
The collected 100+ Kaizen ideas were written in their words, and hard to analyze them. To make further processes easier, I needed to standardize their Kaizen ideas in a standard format such as:
- Despite of ____ (Expectation or Effort)
- In _____ (Department, Group, or Team)
- (Problem or Issue) ______ is happening.
- It is making a negative impact on __________.
- Potential root-causes are ___________.
- Potential solutions are _______.
The standardization on Excel spreadsheet made the Kaizen ideas easier not only to understand, but to sort or grouping with the Kaizen categories.
3. Type of Wastes
I added another column to the Excel spreadsheet for the type of wastes so that the Kaizen items can be identified and grouped by 7 wastes:
- Defects
- Overproduction
- Transportation
- Waiting
- Inventory
- Motion
- Processing
4. Category for Evaluation
We always have the limited number of resources, time and money. We cannot do every thing at once. That’s why I needed to determine the category for evaluation so that the 100+ Kaizen items can be prioritized.
- Impact
- ○ Profit
- ○ Cost
- ○ Fixed Asset
- ○ Business Strategy
- ○ Time to Market
- ○ Lead-time
- ○ Quality
- ○ Customer Satisfaction
- Resource
- ○ Human
- ○ Assets
- ○ Time
- • Risk
- ○ Technical Risk
- ○ Project Risk
- ○ Dependencies
I used the above categories, and each category was assigned a weight number using AHP.
5. Prioritization
I setup a Kaizen team, and we evaluated the 100+ Kaizen items using the categories and their weight numbers. The purpose of evaluation was to prioritize the Kaizen items with quantified numbers. So the Kaizen items were evaluated relatively using the following scaling:
- 0: No impact
- 1: Minor impact
- 3: Moderate impact
- 9: Major impact
The team selected the top 10 highest impact Kaizen items after the prioritization.
6. Execute Kaizen Actions
The team made plans for implementation of the Kaizen items selected in the prioritization. Then the team executed the plan for the implementation.