An interesting Kaizen exercise in the class ..

 Kaizen is about continuous improvement. As usual in the Lean Operations management class for sem 4 MBA in Alliance School of Business, Bangalore, I was talking about Kaizens and had distributed a small self prepared note to the students. About 5 students attended the session in a class strength of 19, as the classes were resuming after the closure due to Covid and hijab row in Karnataka.

Click here for my caselet on kaizen.

After discussing about the different aspects of the Lean process, given here namely, identifying value, plotting the value stream map, creating the pull, establishing the pull system, the final step was continuous improvement or kaizen.

Since I already have an experience of carrying out Kaizens in the industry, I thought this would be a good opportunity to let the students get real hands on experience on administering Kaizens and benefiting from it. All other actions like value identification, plotting value stream map, waste removal, establishing flow and pull in the system have got to do with  contining the status quo, but what makes the Lean system (Toyota Production System) really unique is the concept of continuous improvement or Kaizens. 

Setting aside complacency, the lean system firmly believes that always there is a chance to do things better. Even when we visit the Toyota plant in Bidadi or Jigani, we are always able to observe the immediate urgency in employees minds of the need to bring positive changes in the work environment, procurement, assembly line, product design etc.. 

Accordingly I asked the students to come up with two Kaizens each on how to improve the quality of classroom interaction inside the classroom. The students were on their own. They came out with good suggestions. After collecting the Kaizens, I asked them to be be seated together around a table and evaluate each of the ten Kaizens and classify them into Class A, B or C.

Two Kaizens were class C, impossible to implement, while one Kaizen was class B, ie. possible to implement but needs time, investment in infrastructure and more talent. The third group class A, had the rest seven Kaizens. I asked the students to analyse each of these seven kaizens and identify the top one with greatest impact and benefit. 

Two Kaizens came on top. 

• One relating to bringing more of case discussions, not just caselets in the class. 
• The other Kaizen related to bringing more of visual system of teaching and active learning, activity based learning in the classroom. 

I have asked the students to do an A3 analysis - the PDCA mapping of the improvements (click here) of the 7 Kaizens and tell me how it can be implemented. 

In an earlier occasion while discussing about Kaizens and implementation with the EPGDM students, one of the students told me how the Kaizen system failed in his organisation. The person who proposed the Kaizen had the responsibility of getting it implemented too. In other words, it was only the people having problems who reported the problems and had the responsibility of fixing the problem. Kaizen was looked at from a negative angle - only those who had problems would report them. This saw the Kanban practice failing because no one wanted to admit that his area had problems. 

The A3 discussion is going to add more colour to our class discussion and I am sure the learning would remain in the minds of the students so that they would start practicing Kaizens in full earnest, knowing the intention and spirit behind Kaizens, when they get to industry. 

George.