Kaizen

So about a year, year and a half ago, I was listening to a book tape or something about it.

And so the corporate America has made Kaizen a very popular term.

Kaizen is 1% improvement.

It's a Japanese principle as well.

And there's a lot more to it, but that's the highest level.

And what I do, there's several different processes that are all combined under one roof.

I mean, you have things called Kaizen, you've got Kanbans, you've got process mapping, PFMEA, and we're going to talk about all that.

So nobody's going to be left in the dust.

And what I found when I was learning about this while I was working at Whirlpool is I got this crazy idea.

Yeah.

I mean, the, the, is that Kaizen, like, the Japanese concept of, like, get close to the problem? Yeah, I, I think that makes nothing but sense.

So, like, tactically, building an, an ontology, like, day one at Cavanagh, and we'll maybe talk more about what that implementation looked like, but t- maybe walk me through the tools.

Like, in my head, that's like, it's a really complicated whiteboard.

Well, it's, it is, but you probably don't know what it is.

It's called Kaizen or continuous improvement that's worth understanding that Toyota uses in their production system.

Toyota managers regularly conduct what's called, like a, I don't know if I'm pronouncing this right, Gemba walk.

Gemba meaning the real place.

But my first real exposure to continuous improvement came when I was working in Krasno.

And I was exposed to a concept which is worldwide known, Kaizen, at the time.

And Kaizen, and they said like, it kind of like helped me understand like okay it's not always about technical fixes which i'm a technical guy in the beginning but uh it's not always about technical fixes and they it's kind of like how do you engage with people how do you observe their work uh how do you build habits in a plan at that time a ci manager was there at rostal and he exposed me to that i was like more like a process engineer but then i got exposed to to the Kaizen concept.

But then later, a few years later, I had the opportunity to be part of a black belt program at Caterpillar.

And I did a competency program, which was Caterpillar's production system and also a black belt.

We went out of place and we did that training.

That means we developed it internally, but we were focused on portion planning.

We were focused on how to run a Kaizen, how to mentor people, how to look for how to do a good gate checks on projects.

Basically, you can s- you know, the bar is here, but I'm always gonna try to continue to go past it.

Um, something I got from Toyota was Kaizen, continuous improvement.

That was drilled into us from day one of going to that T10 program, and I take that so seriously because I'm not gonna be this, doing the same thing that I am here today in one year.

Nope.

Oh, wow.

I mean, this is an interesting question, because, you know, I am a big believer of Kaizen.

Kaizen in Japanese, it means actually good work or continuous improvement.

So one of the principles I really believe in is continuous improvement.

I mean, continuous improvement actually means making small improvements daily rather than waiting for one gigantic transformation.

It makes sense, actually, what you say with those small daily improvements.

How did you call the

Japanese? Kaizen.