A Kaizen Event is a facilitated event which utilises an organisation’s in-house expertise in a very focused manner to aggressively work a specific problem or process, delivering results in a fast and sustainable manner. Kaizen is the focused application of lean tools to rapidly reduce waste, to improve cost, quality, delivery, speed, flexibility and responsiveness to internal and external customer needs. It is a vehicle for driving quick-hit value by implementing “do-now” solutions. Kaizen focuses on incremental change and is the continuous improvement vehicle.
Kaizen Events work best when there is concise scope and problem boundaries with clear targeted outcomes, and where there is a need for results quickly. A Kaizen Event can also be used to unblock stalled projects with focused interventions on project challenges. The process can be used in any business area. Team involvement is essential. It should only be used as a problem solving approach.