Kaizen

Kaizen is a Japanese word constructed from two ideographs, the first of which represents
change and the second goodness or virtue. Kaizen is commonly used to indicate the long-term
betterment of something or someone (continuous improvement) as in the phrase Seikatsu o
kaizen suru which means to “better one’s life.”

6 Sigma

Six Sigma is a business management strategy originally developed by Motorola, USA in 1981.
As of 2010, it enjoys widespread application in many sectors of industry, although its application
is not without controversy.

1. Kaizen and Six Sigma are associated with the Quality Model for achieving success in
business.
2. Kaizen is not a business-level strategy for implementing that model
3. Six Sigma refers both to a comprehensive strategy for implementing a flawed version of
the Quality Model and to the limited activity of improving a business process.
4. At the business process improvement level, Six Sigma emphasizes the measurement
and quantitative analysis elements that were previously pioneered and developed in
SPC and SQC. Its backbone methodology is the same as every other quality
improvement tool—problem solving.
5. 6 Sigma, as a business process improvement method, is simply a problem solving
strategy theoretically rooted in the measurement of process variability and guided by
customer requirements.
6. Kaizen is continual improvement for waste and errors, usually fairly simple problems; Six
Sigma is for technical variation based defects, usually fairly complex problems. The
overlap between them lies in mistake proofing.

Six Sigma Kaizen

Top down Bottom up

Systematic approach Common sense
Complicate tools Simple tools
Western culture Eastern culture
Breakthrough improvement Continuous improvement