Kaizen: Business Application

What is Kaizen?

Kaizen is a Japanese concept that translates into ‘change for good’. Is that all? Does it embrace every word we have in our minds about Kaizen? The answer is probably negative. That is why the original essence of concepts must always be considered to get to their true meanings. To understand this, let us take the example of Yoga.

Yoga emerged from India and it points towards ‘union’ — the union of the body and mind, the spiritual and the bodily through certain physical and mental exercises. The purpose of Yoga is consciousness awareness — of our connection with the universe or nature. Without understanding the ‘why’ of it, you run the risk of getting stuck with the linguistics and exercises without deriving their true benefits. The tragic outcome of this is that we can practise Yoga every morning or evening and still spend the rest of the day being unrest.

To understand Kaizen, we should take a similar approach. With the lack of information as a hindrance, we can take cues from other philosophies with similar fundamentals. And when we do this, we find that so many eastern philosophies carry a particular undertone of subtleness and patience. They refer to harmony and compliance. Now if you relook at the definition of Kaizen — ‘change for good’, it has deeper connotations. Now it also encompasses the other features of Kaizen that we otherwise know on the surface. It now covers a steady, long-term, and embryonic inclusion of changes to become better.

Why and how your business can benefit from Kaizen

Leadership

The existing quality of leadership organisations possess has wide ramifications on their businesses. Organisations also need to ensure the future availability of good leaders. However, the problem is leadership cannot be brewed on short notice. Neither do leadership come by giving someone power and position. But leadership can be cultivated. Kaizen is an apt approach to it. Slow and steady solutions like providing training and development, job rotation, job redesign, and temporary charge of bigger roles fit into the idea of Kaizen.

People & Culture

Making changes in work culture is not easy in big organisations. Work culture is an outcome of years or even decades. The same holds when we think of reshaping it going into the future. This is where Kaizen fits in. Small, gradual changes help both organisations and employees to introduce and embrace big changes thinned over time.

Change Management

When something tends to change in our environment, our general response options are acceptance, rejection, or indifference. But if the change is necessary, we have only one option — embrace it (acceptance). Small changes are not difficult to manage. But organisational changes can be challenging. It affects the existing planning and strategies, policies, people, operational systems, organisational design and structures, etc. Applying Kaizen business solutions help organisations infuse the new requirements in a planned and phased manner within the available time frame. If we are talking about any urgent change, Kaizen will not be the right approach. But to deal with changes of urgent nature, Kaizen can help prepare action-response plans and keep their effectiveness at heightened levels.

Efficient Operations

Improved productivity is probably the biggest and most apparent benefit of Kaizen application. When businesses keep on improvising their processes and operations, it carries a big impact at the company level and in the long run. Imagine that a manufacturing process could be shortened from 15 minutes to 14 minutes over a period of 6 months. This one-minute saved means that from now on, the business can have additional output, lesser working hours, and the running time of machines will be reduced. There will be other consequential benefits.

How BPX can help

Our core ideology is to help enterprises (both business and non-business) become better organised. No matter the service or solution, we seek to lend the ability to become and stay organised at it. We believe that the ability to exist in a stable and organised state is necessary to implement Kaizen in business or non-business scenarios. Change could be a bad idea while being in an unstable state of being. Here is a brief glimpse of what we do.

SOP Consulting

BPX offers process and SOP expertise for operations planning. With our SOP-based process solutions, our clients can exercise greater control over their process workflows. This includes making the required improvisations from time to time aligning with the core fundamentals of Kaizen. With the operational standards, duties, and timelines established, changes could be implemented with high precision. If called for, our team of SOP experts also help clients implement the Kaizen SOPs.

Process Automation Consulting

Process automation plays a key role in achieving operational efficiency and waste reduction. In process automation consulting, we help our clients map their IT requirements, identify the best-fit solution, and provide the necessary assistance in its implementation. We ensure that the business process requirements and the software under consideration are in perfect alignment. If required, we also offer coordination assistance with vendors.

Please note that we are not into software development. The final decision on software and vendor selection is that of the clients.

Process Documentation

Having process documents is helpful for many operational reasons. But from the perspective of Kaizen, these documents are the foundational texts to analyse the as-is processes and identify the areas requiring changes to develop the to-be processes. Here, we design and develop the process documents following a planned and systematic methodology and in congruence with the prevalent industry standards and specifications provided by clients.

For more information visit us : businessprocessxperts.com