Continuous Improvement (Kaizen): a Real Business Need or a Waste of Money?

The strategy of Continuous Improvement (also widely referred to as Kaizen), has become an important tool for reducing costs and keeping pace with the changing business environment. In Poland, for example, this topic is often discussed by keynote speakers and business leaders on manufacturing excellence summits and conferences.

The main reason for this is that Kaizen is a proven method to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of manufacturing processes and even employee well-being and job satisfaction. However, many business decision makers and production managers often doubt the effectiveness of Continuous Improvement, citing the complexity of the strategy as the main barrier to adoption.

So, does Continuous Improvement really work? Can it help to reduce costs and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of manufacturing?

We’ll answer these questions in this article using the experience of other companies.

Continuous Improvement: a Quick Introduction

If you’re reading this article, chances are that you’re familiar with the concept of Continuous Improvement, so we’ll keep this section brief and move on to answering the abovementioned questions.

Continuous Improvement in manufacturing is a structured and participatory approach based on the idea that ongoing changes in processes can lead to major improvements.

The purpose of Continuous Improvement is to create a culture where employees involved in manufacturing are actively engaged with monitoring for inefficiencies and improving performance.

Role of Employees

In this strategy, a special emphasis is made on employee involvement. Since it’s assumed that those closest to the work process are best suited to provide improvement suggestions, and therefore, implement changes, employees have to be at the forefront of the continuous improvement strategy.

Role of Managers

At the same time, managers should also be active participants in the process of determining process-related problems and taking actions to support line employees during the implementation of Kaizen.

Continuous Improvement: Is It Worth Your Investment?

Before starting with Continuous Improvement programs, it is important to understand their advantages and disadvantages for businesses.

Let’s start with the advantages.

Continuous Improvement is more a strategy than a tool, so the implementation of programs often lasts months and even years. Under the strategy, all employees involved in a project become responsible for defining inefficiencies, delays, and other issues impacting the performance, as well as suggesting how to eliminate them.

The ultimate goals of any Continuous Improvement Program include better productivity, effectiveness, efficiency, safety, and waste reduction (read about the seven Lean wastes in this guide). If achieved, these goals can provide the following advantages to an organization:

• Less waste. The seven wastes of Lean — transportation, motion, waiting, overproduction, inventory, defects, overprocessing — are categories of unproductive manufacturing practices that result in more avoidable costs
• Higher employee satisfaction. Since managers encourage employees to take an active part in improving the business, the latter feel more accomplished, valued, and appreciated
• Increased competitiveness. Reduction of waste and increases in production efficiency and effectiveness contribute to higher quality of products, success in meeting customer deadlines, and more business
• Improved teamwork and problem-solving. Working together to solve manufacturing problems allows to build and strengthen existing teams.

Much focus of Continuous Improvement programs is on minimizing the seven wastes. Perhaps not surprisingly, as the vast majority of employees in manufacturing businesses cite waste as the most important problem that needed to be eliminated.

While the ultimate purpose of Continuous Improvement is to improve manufacturing processes, it is also important to understand that inappropriate implementation may not work in the best interest of a business.

Let’s consider these risks associated with Continuous Improvement.

• A lack of real improvement. Often, businesses achieve only insignificant progress that vanes with time because of the lack of training and understanding of how to implement Continuous Improvement. Also, the managers may not realize that real improvement comes from exploring an entirely different approach or abandoning outdated techniques everybody is used to applying
• Improper implementation. Often, businesses fail to implement Kaizen programs correctly — by failing to give employees real power or motivation to change processes, etc. — which leads to more problems than improvements, in addition to employee frustration.

Clearly, the benefits of Continuous Improvement outweigh the disadvantages, and the latter come from poor knowledge of the implementation.

How to Implement Continuous Improvement: an Example

To demonstrate potential gains as well as the implementation process, let’s consider the following case study completed at a manufacturing plant in Poland.

Goal: to streamline the production process by using the principles of Continuous Improvement

Site: an automotive industry production facility in Poland

Findings: Analysis of the movement at a worksite through the application of Lean Manufacturing tools, namely Continuous Improvement and spaghetti diagram, resulted in:

• Reorganization of the workplace
• Reduction of steps that a worker has to take to complete the process
• Shorter Time to Complete the Workcycle
• Shorter time to complete operations per unit.

By testing the movement of an employee — a welder — at a worksite, the Continuous Improvement team aimed to rationalize them and improve the process by eliminating motion waste (unnecessary employee waste that doesn’t contribute to the goal of the process).

The image of the worksite layout before the improvements is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Workplace organization before the improvements made by the Continuous Improvement team. Credit: Opole University of Technology.

To complete their part in the production process, a welder needs to complete 19 specific activities described in Figure 2. As you can see, a lot of manual work is involved to move the product to the next post and continue the process.

Figure 2. Activities performed by the employee at the worksite during welding operations. Credit: Opole University of Technology.

To map these activities and give a production manager as well as the Continuous Improvement team an overview of the steps that a welder takes during a workcycle, a spaghetti diagram was used.

Note: Spaghetti diagram is a visual representation of a manufacturing workflow.

Figure 3. A spaghetti diagram showing the steps taken by a welder during one workcycle. Credit: Opole University of Technology.

As noted in the table to the right, the welder takes 14 steps during one workcycle (19 activities). To complete all operations, he or she also has to take 8 routes, drawn on the spaghetti diagram on the left side of Figure 3.

By analyzing the workcycle and activities, the Continuous Improvement team was able to come up with two improvement actions described in Figure 4.

Figure 4. Improvement actions proposed by the Continuous Improvement team. Credit: Opole University of Technology.

These proposals required some changes in the welder’s worksite layout. Here’s how the workplace was reorganized after implementing the changes.

Figure 5. The workplace after improvements introduced by Continuous Improvement team. Credit: Opole University of Technology

According to the case study, the alteration of the worksite results in a number of positive changes that had both immediate and long-term effects on the performance of the welder as well as the process time.

The first significant change was the reduction in the number of routes and steps that the welder had to take to complete the workcycle. After the reorganization of the workplace, the employee had to complete not 8, but only 6 routes; moreover, the number of steps was reduced from 14 to 10.

Figure 6. Spaghetti diagram after implementation of the changes. Credit: Opole University of Technology.

This may seem insignificant but identifying small opportunities for improvement and taking advantage of them is the essence of Continuous Improvement. The changes introduced in the case study resulted in significant gains in the long-term.

Fewer Steps taken by the Welder

The number of steps taken by the welder was reduced by almost 29 percent.

Figure 7. The number of steps taken by the welder before and after the changes over the period of one year. Credit: Opole University of Technology.

Shorter Time to Complete the Workcycle

The changes — moving the production components closer to the place of their welding helped to reduce the time of the workcycle by 1.92 seconds. This results in saving of 23.2 hours per year.

Figure 8. The difference in annual work time at the worksite that resulted after the implementation of changes.

Shorter Time to Complete Operations per Unit

Since the number of steps taken by the employee was reduced by four steps, the time per unit of the performed operation — welding — was reduced from 6.72 seconds to 4.8 seconds.

If applied to all workstations, the changes can produce a significant impact on the overall productivity of the plant.

How to Ensure that Continuous Improvement Programs Work

Clearly, Continuous Improvement is something that can really benefit a manufacturing business if implemented properly. Businesses looking to increase the effectiveness of their projects today are turning to Lean Manufacturing specialists and digital tracking tools.

Real-time tracking systems, for example, have emerged as an effective tool for tracking processes and employees, monitoring their performance, and even producing digital spaghetti diagrams.

A Continuous Improvement project like the one described above can be successfully deployed and implemented easily and quickly by using a real-time tracking system.

If you’d like to know how a real-time tracking system can help your business with the implementation of Continuous Improvement, feel free to check out 5 Ways to Support Continuous Improvement (Kaizen) in Production with Real-Time Tracking on our blog.