style='font-family:Arial'>To Blitz or Not to Blitz

style='font-family:Arial'> 

href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/14/36/">Kaizen Blitz style='font-family:Arial'> seems on the face of it an oxymoron – if
Kaizen is 'continuous, unending improvement', how can you 'blitz' it? Part of
the answer may lie in the origin of the process, which is worth recalling.

' href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/14/36/">Kaizen Blitz' style='font-family:Arial'> was brought to the West by Yoshiki Iwata, an ex-Toyota
employee, who taught the href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/30/63/">Toyota Production
System to Toyota's suppliers.
The Toyota learning approach is very experiential – Taiichi Ohno famously
declined to discuss the theory of href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/30/63/">TPS style='font-family:Arial'> with Shigeo Shingo – he was only interested in
learning through application. The experiential model means that the learner is
expected to follow the direction of the sensei, or master, and learn through
the experience, until they are able to apply href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/30/63/">TPS style='font-family:Arial'> principles themselves.

Productivity Inc brought
this approach to the USA in 1988, when we engaged Mr Iwata, then a private
consultant, and translated his material into English. In order to teach href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/30/63/">TPS style='font-family:Arial'> in the West, Mr Iwata asked us to provide a host
company, where they could work on a real production line. What Mr Iwata was
teaching was how to use standard work combination sheets to design href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/33/71/">one piece flow
cells, an integral part of href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/30/63/">TPS style='font-family:Arial'>. The event lasted five days, and we originally
called it 'Five Days and One Night', the one night referring to the amount of
sleep people should expect in a very intense process.

I am not sure how it became
to be called the ' href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/14/36/">Kaizen Blitz' style='font-family:Arial'>. Mr Iwata would routinely refer to kaizen when
talking about improvement, but I suspect the href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/14/36/">Kaizen Blitz style='font-family:Arial'>name may have come about when Mr Iwata subsequently
presented the same programme for Mr Imai's Kaizen Institute, Mr Imai being the
interpreter and translator who wrote the original book called Kaizen, and used
it for the name of his consulting company. The process was also taken up by the
Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME) who I believe registered the
term as a trademark.

Many href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/12/27/">lean manufacturing
consultants and trainers, especially
those who learnt about TPS in the late eighties and early nineties, have
themselves been through the href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/14/36/">Kaizen Blitz style='font-family:Arial'> learning experience, either with Mr Iwata's group or
at some remove from them. The original machining cell example used by Mr Iwata
to teach standard work combination sheets can be found in many a one piece flow
cell design manual, including our own (as initial translators we have some
claim to the copyright).

But what does the href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/14/36/">Kaizen Blitz style='font-family:Arial'> teach us about improvement? One lesson is 'just do
it'. One characterisation of href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/30/63/">TPS style='font-family:Arial'> by a Japanese authority defines its strength as
Routinised Methods, Routinised Problem Solving and Experimentation. These last
two are the foundation of the href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/14/36/">Kaizen Blitz style='font-family:Arial'> – a combination of the use of a standard
Kaizen method – the standard work combination sheet – and practical
experimentation. There is also the emphasis on defining a standard method for
the new layout, hence standard work combination sheet. The original href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/14/36/">Kaizen Blitz style='font-family:Arial'> also teaches us the value of href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/33/71/">one piece flow style='font-family:Arial'> in lead time, cost and inventory reduction.

One Piece Flow Cells are
however a very narrow definition of Kaizen, which is a powerful organisational
culture. Developing this culture is a challenge, which has been undertaken by
many companies, some of whom have followed alternative approaches such as
Kaizen Teian, Improvement through Suggestions, which is promoted by the Japan
Human Relations Association.

We at href="http://www.productivityeurope.org">Productivity style='font-family:Arial'> developed other Blitz events – href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/28/56/">Visual Factory style='font-family:Arial'>, a 5S href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/14/36/">Kaizen Blitz style='font-family:Arial'>, and href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/15/58/">Maintenance
Miracle, an Autonomous
Maintenance TPM style='font-family:Arial'> Blitz. These are very practical learning
experiences, but have to be seen as that, learning experiences, not a blueprint
for implementation.

More systemic approaches to href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/12/27/">Lean Manufacturing style='font-family:Arial'> have brought us to techniques such as href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/17/42/">Value Stream
Mapping, developed by Mike
Rother. VSM style='font-family:Arial'> looks at a whole value chain, not just a single cell
or production line; the criticism of cell based blitzes being that they simply
move the inventory or bottleneck elsewhere. But there is a chicken and egg here
– in order to get flow throughout the value stream you need to connect a
network of flow cells. And in order to develop flow cells you need standard
operating methods. href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/17/42/">VSM style='font-family:Arial'> can define an ideal, the future state, but to
achieve it you need to do detailed work on individual cells and operations, the
way Mr Iwata and others taught us.

Some of the constraints
identified by a href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/17/42/">VSM style='font-family:Arial'> exercise may not be flow/inventory issues. They may
be quality problems or machine efficiency issues. This is where TQC and href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/15/58/">TPM style='font-family:Arial'> techniques can be more effective.

My preferred starting point
is 5S style='font-family:Arial'>, simply to give visibility and to develop standards.
It is also an authentic Kaizen approach, in that href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/21/46/">5S style='font-family:Arial'> improvements have to be developed and owned by the
natural work teams in production (it is virtually impossible to href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/21/46/">5S style='font-family:Arial'> someone else's work area).

In an engineered product
environment I would then do a value stream map to identify the constraints to
reducing lead times and inventories, using this to identify Kaizen projects, be
they flow, quality or efficiency issues. True href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/14/36/">Kaizen style='font-family:Arial'> would then be the team based unending elimination of
these issues and constraints, allowing us to approach perfect flow, an ideal
which can only be approached without limit, never reached.

A href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/14/36/">kaizen style='font-family:Arial'> culture can only be developed by involving people in
making improvements in their own work areas, responding to the Quality, Cost
and Delivery needs of their customers, internal and external. A blitz illustrates
just how great the opportunity can be – people see the scale of defects
and waste, but the blitz process needs to be supported by ongoing team problem
solving. There are many processes for this – 8D, the problem solving
method of many automotive manufacturers, or the TQ story, href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/14/36/">CEDAC style='font-family:Arial'> (Cause and Effect Diagram with Addition of Cards) or
other root cause problem solving approaches.

True href="http://www.productivityeurope.org/content/view/14/36/">Kaizen style='font-family:Arial'> is ongoing cultural change, not just a blitz, but a
blitz can open people's eyes and demonstrate the value of a standard
improvement process and experimentation through a plan, do, check, act cycle.