How to Improve Your Business With The Kaizen System

Derek — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 20:02:37 +0000

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Why is Toyota dominating the car manufacturing business in America? Do they have secrets that the rest of the world doesn’t know? Do they innovate and implement the best technology or are they just really lucky that people love the Toyota Prius?

There is a secret and it can be used to improve all businesses. From running a small retail business to running a blog, the Toyota way of approaching manufacturing can help you grow your business and increase your profits.

The Toyota Secret is “Kaizen,” or for the direct translation, “continuous improvement.” Employees are encouraged to come up with and share ways to improve their job function – even if it only saves 1/2 a second or 1 penny. The “Kaizen” system focuses a company on small improvements that will add up to big results when you give it a lot of time and leverage it over a lot of people.

But how can you use it to improve your business?

In the remaining part of this article, you’ll learn about the five key steps needed to implement the “Kaizen” or the Japanese way of doing business. So, let’s get started:

Standardize Your Process

When you want to implement “Kaizen,” you need to standardize your process. You probably remember the importance of standardization from your 3rd grade Science class when you learned about the Scientific method. You need to set a control so you know whether your small change is improving or hurting your business.

Here are some ways to Standardize your process:

The Time Standard: You can conduct business at the same time for the same amount of time. For example, if you are a blogger, you may want to spend X hours per week on writing blog posts. No matter what, when you hit your time standard you stop.

The Place Standard: You can conduct business at the same place. For bloggers, this means if you want to write your blog posts at a coffee shop, you can, but make sure you keep track of what blog posts you wrote at a coffee shop.

The Action Standard: You can conduct business the same way as usual. If you’re a telemarketer, this means you make phone calls, or if you’re a blogger, this means you write blog posts.

Please note, the more specific you are with your standard the better. It will help you make sure you can find an accurate correlation.

Measure Your Process

The next step in the “Kaizen” method is to measure your process. If you don’t measure what you’re doing, there will be no way for you to know if you’re making improvements. For example, how would you know if you are losing weight if you don’t weigh yourself?

Here are some examples:

Money: How much money does this process make you? How much money does the process cost you?

Time: How much time does it take you to complete?

Widgets: How many widgets do you create? How many phonecalls do you make? How many blog posts do you write?

Compare Your Actual Results vs Desired Results

The third step in the “Kaizen” method is to compare where you are with where you want to be. However, to do this you need a clear understanding of where you want to be. Some people may want to increase their earnings, whereas some people may want to become more efficient.

Additionally, this is a great time to discover where you want to be. Once you know your actual measured results, you should make your desired results just a little bit higher than your actual results. For example, if you’re making 10 sales call per day, why not aim for 13 sales call? Or, if you’re averaging 3 blog posts per week, why don’t you aim for 5?

Discover How to Achieve Your Desired Results

And here is the big one. How do you plan on achieving your goals? You can’t simply make a goal and hope for it to happen. You need to create a plan and follow through with it. If your plan doesn’t work, you need to create a new plan and follow through with it.

During this stage of the “Kaizen” plan you should focus on activity or more simply, focus on what you can control. Here is where you make that one extra sales call or write one extra blog post. Here is where you comment on one more blog or meet one new person.

More specifically, if you are a blogger, don’t spend your time focusing on “search engine optimization” and ranking in Google. Sure, you may be able to influence it slightly, but you could simply just write four more blog posts or e-mail four new bloggers.

Make Your Your New Results Your Standard

Congratulations. At this point in the “Kaizen” method, you achieved your desired results. However, Toyota didn’t completely dominate the car industry by sitting still and enjoying their past success. They did it all over again.

Once you make gains, you need to make sure you make your gains the new standard. Then, focus on how you plan to achieve your next set of desired results. Please note, once you get to a certain point and completely maximize what you and your team are doing, there is only one more way to accomplish more and that is to work with more people.

The Success Factors Spotlight

Do you want to learn how Toyota implemented the “Kaizen” method specifically? Why don’t you check out “The Toyota Way” over at Wikipedia. It is comprehensive and should help you find ways to implement this into your work stream or startup.

The Bottom Line

Much of this may seem like common sense, but that isn’t the point. The “Kaizen” way is about implementing this process into your work stream so you can improve it. So, while this may seem like common sense, are you currently using it? Are you able to describe in words what your “Kaizen” system is? If so, I invite you to share it in the comments.

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