KAIZEN is a way to improve activities process specially in large company.
Kaizen is a continuous process of change in small incremental steps, and contrasts with the rip and replace approach of some other methodologies.
It requires involvement in detailed process changes to be part of the regular work cycle, and you need to understand the cultural implications of this, in the workplace to determine if it is feasible and if it is appropriate.
In many banks you can apply this approach, as the workforce is well educated and flexible, and thus the small changes can be rapidly explained documented and introduced, although measurement of the improvement will still be required, if the costs and effort to implement is small a "lets try it and see" approach may be adopted. I do not consider this sensible, you need to have some metric that will expose the success or otherwise of every change.
Are the management willing to have an "organic" driver of change rather than a prescriptive top down driver? You need to consider this in the context of your bank.
In many banks you cannot use this approach, as the senior staff, managers and executives are not going to permit it. They would argue that the risks implicit in new processes which have not been carefully considered and examined in advance are too large. This argument I think is wrong, but common.
So the answer is examine the organization first. Is it a rule based culture with all decisions coming down from the top, if so Kaizen is unlikely to be welcomed.
My example would be a small cooperative bank in an advanced economy might find it possible to use this approach. A bank in an economy which has been restricted or controlled in great detail by its managers or regulators might not been able to make use of it.
I tried to use it in a bank in Qatar and frankly it was not well received, partly because of the ego issues in the senior executives. Partly because the staff were of mixed levels of ability to accept new ways of working. These are the issues to consider.
Hello,
I am investigating the application of Kaizen method with the purpose to reach World Class Manufacturing level in production process. I understand your critical points because it is hard to change processes. Implementing Kaizen method, we have to take in consideration that this method was developed by Japanese and they are more favourable to change for increase process quality. Therefore, we have to take in consideration cultural differences between Japanese culture and contry culture where we are implementing Kaizen method. In addiction, Kaizen methd is relate to a change of management vision that is really hard to achieve.
In "challenge to world-class manufacturing", Yamashina identified some pittfalls for implementation of Kaizen method. It is hard to solve these pittfalls but solving them you will be able to enhance processes quality.
The purpose of Lean is to work closely with the team executing the process to effect successful change around the defined success criteria. The key to success lies in the quality and "honesty" of the engagement and has nothing to do with the quality tools utilised to develop the change.
In a past life I worked with a team of SME's to improve the capacity of a derivative trading process at a large US investment bank in London. The symptom was that 90% of trades submitted by front office were being reworked by middle office before being submitted to back office, the cause would be best characterised as sloppy form filling by traders who were more interested in profit than accuracy; mitigation lay in the potential for tooling and mistake proofing of the traders screens through some relatively simple visual basic.
The technical part was relatively easy; what was needed now was motivation to change and to see the value of the change. Middle office was easy; they were over worked fixing the mess created by front office. The key to success however was in having the traders adopt the changes, these were individuals who could be best described as "making millions in minutes" with a broken system, they needed motivation through demonstrable benefits, the what's in it for me factor. The improvements secured a possible 10 fold increase in trade volume for the same size middle office which had to be funded by front office margins. We had also simplified the interface and in doing so minimised the training a trader required to get up to speed and were able to secure funding for the visual basic work from the front office business owners who again were sold on the increased volumes and profit to the teams.
If Kaizen fails to resolve the technical problem it is generally because it was not correctly understood in the first instance; this is however the strength of Kaizen - experimentation in a controlled environment by those who run the process.
If it fails to implement a perfectly good solution then the fault lies in the quality of the engagement.
I would strongly suggest that you take a look at the GE CAP process developed by GE Money to support their Six Sigma deployment. It discusses the topic of Change Acceptance in some depth.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Biological Science
- Anatomy
- Tissue