Kaizen
and Continuous Improvement
Джеффри Лайкер
(Jeffrey
K. Liker). Материал предоставлен
автором, опубликован у нас 16.07.2012
Об
авторе: Джеффри Лайкер - профессор
кафедры организации и инженерного
обеспечения производства
Мичиганского университета, один из
создателей и руководитель программ
Japan Technology Management Program и Lean Manufacturing and
Product Development Certificate Program. Автор многих
книг о TPS, в т.ч. "Дао Тойоа" —
лауреат четырех премий Синго за
выдающиеся достижения (Shingo Prize for
Excellence). Его статьи публиковались в The
Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review и др.
Доктор Лайкер возглавляет Optiprise -
консультационную фирму,
занимающуюся вопросами организации
бережливых предприятий и управления
цепочками поставок. Он является
редактором книги Becoming Lean: Experiences of U.S.
Manufacturer, которая в 1998 г. получила
премию Сигео Синго за выдающиеся
достижения в исследованиях
производства.
Since the 1980s when the
“Japanese miracle” of near perfect quality entered global
awareness the concept of kaizen has grown to be part of the international vocabulary of
management theory. Kaizen represents a vision of an ideal state—improvement
everywhere to achieve lowest cost, highest quality, and best service
to the customer. As
organizations throughout the world have experimented with various
incarnations of programs to achieve kaizen,
e.g., business process reengineering, total quality management, six
sigma, lean, theory of constraints, there has been a shift in
thinking from viewing kaizen
as a toolkit to transform processes, to viewing kaizen
as the essence of a culture focused on striving for excellence
across the enterprise. These
real world experiments have led to basic insights into a broad range
of issues in management theory including the nature of bureaucracy,
human motivation, how to train and develop people, the skills and
roles of leadership, knowledge management, and the relationship
between strategy and operational excellence.
Kaizen means change for
the better. Continuous
improvement taken literally means everything is getting better all
the time. Sometimes a
distinction is made between kaizen, which is interpreted as small incremental changes, and kaikaku
which refers to big change. This
is not necessary since “change for the better” can be big or
small. Henry Ford said
“Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs,”[1]
and if you look closely at big game-changing innovations they have
been achieved through many small steps, some dead-ends, and others
progress toward the vision.
Kaizen
is a Japanese word and often associated with Japanese manufacturing,
particularly the Toyota Production System (TPS).
The book that first popularized the core concepts of TPS was The
Machine that Changed the World.
This book introduced the phrase “lean production” as a
new management paradigm as significant as the shift from craft to
mass production. Lean
spread as programs first in industry and then into the service
sector and has taken on a life of its own with different
interpretations by different authors, consulting groups, and
organizations. One
simple classification is into two categories:
tool-oriented lean (mechanistic) and people-oriented lean (organic).
The original TPS in Toyota is the later and the tools and
lean processes highlighted problems which could shut down production
driving active problem solving.
The role of people was to think creatively about how to solve
those problems, but people had to be developed to have the skills
for solving the problems, which Toyota invested deeply mostly
through on-the-job development with skilled coaches (called sensei).
[2]
As Toyota globalized it became
clear that there was a need to take the philosophy underlying TPS
and make what Japanese members learned on the job explicit so it
could be taught in the hundreds of companies in which Toyota had
operations and sales offices. The
resulting document, The Toyota Way 2001, defined two pillars that represent the core
philosophy of the company: respect
for people and continuous improvement.[3]
The underlying principles, more general than manufacturing,
have become an aspiration for organizations throughout the world in
all sectors including industry, government, education, defense,
healthcare, mining, and financial services.
A related concept is “lean management” which focuses on
eliminating waste from processes.[4]
Unfortunately the concept of lean is often misinterpreted as
a program led by experts to reduce cost through waste reduction.
In reality, lean thinking is virtually synonymous with
continuous improvement, aka kaizen, which requires engaged people skilled in a discipline
problem solving methodology.
The underlying theory of problem
solving evolved from Shewhart’s concept, taught to Toyota by W.
Edwards Deming, evolved in Japan into what we know call the
Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle.[5]
Too often problems are solved by assuming it is clear what
the problem is and jumping to solutions with very little follow up
to learn what happened. Daniel
Kahneman calls this “fast thinking,” as opposed to slow thinking
which takes much more mental effort.[6]
In fast thinking we jump to the first conclusion that comes to mind
without thinking deeply or analytically about the problem. As a
general principle he summarizes many cognitive psychology
experiments with the conclusion that people seek to minimize mental
effort, thus preferring fast thinking.
PDCA requires a careful definition of the
real problem and then driving to the root cause by deep (slow)
thinking and careful study. Only
then are possible countermeasures defined, one selected and tried (Do)
and then the results studied (check) with further action (Act) based
on the findings.
Mike Rother introduces the
concept of kata to
emphasize that the process of improvement requires a specific skill
set and way of thinking that must be learned.[7]
Kata, a Japanese
term often used in martial arts, is a deeply learned routine. He
lays out in detail the “improvement kata,”
that drives continuous improvement, that is a set of routines that
need to be repeatedly practiced, with an expert coach as a guide,
until they become second nature and the focus can be on the content
of the problem instead of the process steps of problem solving.
In essence one must work hard, practice in a determined way,
and it helps to have a coach for support and motivation, in order to
overcome the tendency toward fast thinking.
Routines bring to mind
standardization which is often thought to stifle creativity.
But Adler, studying the Toyota Production System at NUMMI,
the joint venture between Toyota and General Motors in California,
observed an organization filled with bureaucratic standards that
were being dynamically adjusted by work teams through kaizen.[8]
This caused him to question the very nature of bureaucracy, and the
simple distinction in organizational theory between mechanistic and
organic organizations.[9]
He concluded there were different types of bureaucracies. He
distinguished between “coercive bureaucracy” in which standards
are developed by experts and imposed top down through a command and
control structure and “enabling bureaucracy” in which standards
are best practice templates owned and improved upon by work groups
throughout the organization. Enabling
bureaucracy actually encourages In fact, without standardization
individuals learn and may improve what they do, but the improvements
are not shared and institutionalized so organizational learning is
not possible.[10]
Let’s consider two cases that
tried to develop continuous improvement cultures, one through
coercive bureaucracy and the other through enabling bureaucracy. [11]
A U.S. shipyard that repairs and overhauls submarines and
aircraft carriers embarked on a program they taught by establishing
a “lean six-sigma” academy.
Graduates earned “black belts” and were sent into the
shipyard to do projects. While
each project showed improvements to the bottom line there was little
change in the culture of the shipyards, little buy-in from people
doing the work, and the well-documented changes were only
superficially implemented generally degrading over time—the
opposite of continuous improvement.
In fact the approach to change reflected the coercive
bureaucracy that was at the core of the shipyard, rather than
changing the culture. A
smaller shipyard that had a more team-centered enabling culture
started with deep changes in pilot areas intensively coaching teams
in those areas until they were capable of kaizen,
then spread the learning work group by work group slowly and
patiently and had far more sustainable results with evidence of a
good deal of learning. This
eventually spread across the yard and change was deep.
The irony is that over time, due to lack of consistent
leadership (leaders were frequently rotated), neither program was
able to sustain the journey to continuous improvement.
This case study illustrates two
key points. First, it is
far too easy to confuse continuous improvement with a toolkit that
can be mechanistically applied to processes that are presumed to be
static. In fact,
processes are dynamic and naturally variable and require continuous
improvement even to maintain a steady state and even more effort to
improve in an innovative way. Second, continuous improvement is 100
percent dependent on people, and people will not push themselves to
keep improving without strong leadership coaching and support.
The leaders themselves need to be the first to transform
themselves to become skilled at kaizen so they can then teach others.[12]
Like any life pursuit, such as sports, art, music, cooking,
continuous improvement requires a drive for excellence and
continuous practice and the ideal is always just out of reach.
See Also:
Lean Enterprise
Learning Organization
High Performance Work Systems
Level-5 Leadership
Organic and Mechanistic Forms
Quality Circles
Socio-Technical Theory
Total Quality Management
[
Henry Ford, Today and
Tomorrow, N.Y.: Productivity Press, 1988.
Jeffrey K. Liker, The
Toyota Way, N.Y.: McGraw Hill, 2004
The Toyota Way 2001,
Tokyo: internal
Toyota Motor Corporation document, 2001.
James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones, Lean
Thinking, Cambridge: Free Press, 2003.
W.
Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis, Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2000.
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast
and Slow, N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
Mike Rother, Toyota Kata,
N.Y.: McGraw Hill, 2009.
Paul S. Adler and Bryan Borys, “Two Types of Bureaucracy:
Enabling and Coercive,” Administrative Science Quarterly, 41:1, pp. 61-89, 1996.
Tom Burns and G.M. Stalker, The
Management of Innovation, N.Y.: Oxford University Press,
1994.
Robert E. Cole, “Reflections on Organizational Learning
in U.S. and Japanese Industry,” pp. 365-379 in J. K. Liker, J.
E. Ettlie, and J.C. Campbell, Engineered
in Japan, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Jeffrey Liker and James Franz, The
Toyota Way to Continuous Improvement, N.Y.: McGraw Hill,
2011 (see chapter 6).
[12]
Jeffrey K. Liker and Gary L. Convis, The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership, N.Y.: McGraw Hill, 2011.
Анонс:
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