Business Studies

The Kaizen ideology:

Kaizen is the idea that a business slowly improves quality and efficiency within its construct. This is done through the business gradually making small changes within the faculty. The concept relies on employees being the most useful people to pick up any flaws or potential developments, as they’re the ones working in the environment hence they’re expected to know what goes on the best.

Kaizen can either be carried out by an individual or a group of people in a business. What makes Kaizen different to other ways of improving is Kaizen goes about changes gradually, opposed to the usual leaps made by other methods. The idea is that any changes should be small enough to easily implement, as they’re less likely to be too complex to organize sorting and less likely to need a large sum of capital.

Pros:
Encourages employees to take ownership of their position, giving more motivation with responsibility.

Effective for adding an environment of trust in a team, creating more of an equal democracy in the workplace. Theory Y employer tactic.

Cons:
Can’t overlook massive changes like moving manufacturing off-shore so you can’t only rely on gradual, small changes made by Kaizen.

Can be seen as an unrelenting process as employees can find it pressuring to come up with the improvements continuously (Employees can often have a minimum target for making improvements in order for the company to keep making changes).

Toyota is an example of a company that uses Kaizen to improve its quality and efficiency:

“In 1999 at one U.S. plant, 7,000 Toyota employees submitted over 75,000 suggestions, of which 99% were implemented.” -