An experienced turnaround executive, Richard McCorry resides in Rochester Hills, Michigan. An advocate for lean manufacturing and efficient business operations, Michigan resident Richard McCorry delivered a presentation about the benefits of kaizen earlier in his career.
Kaizen is a philosophy that originated in Japan after World War II. Derived from the words “kai,” which means change and “zen,” which means good, kaizen refers to the belief that all processes can be improved. It encourages people involved in an organization’s operations, from the executives to floor workers, to continuously seek new ways of improving the organization.
While some companies have a stick-to-what-works mentality, kaizen promotes continuous improvement in that nothing is ever truly perfect; processes can always be made faster, safer, more economical, more efficient, and less wasteful.
This philosophy was integral to the rise of many Japanese manufacturers including Toyota, which used it to create continuous improvements across the organization. In modern manufacturing practice, kaizen is employed to reduce forms of waste such as materials that do not add value, time wastage, product or service defects, over-processing, and unwarranted variations.
Because kaizen is a philosophy, there are many ways in which it can be put in practice. A commonly used strategy involves the following steps: identify areas requiring improvement, develop hypotheses, run experiments, evaluate results, refine the experiments, and then continuously monitor and improve.
