Kaizen (5S) explained by -Avishkar

The word Kaizen is derived from two Japanese words, Kai meaning change and Zen meaning good.
Clubbed together, it means change for good. It is a concept which was spearheaded by Toyota Production
System, which defines it in simple terms as continuous improvement or small incremental development
in all areas of company and not just the manufacturing. This makes the concept broadly useful.

Kaizen is defined as a continuous effort by each and every employee (from the CEO to field staff) to ensure
improvement of all processes and systems of a particular organization. The concept is divided further in
five words and hence it is also called as 5S. The 5S of Kaizen are:

• Seiri: It stands for Sort Out. According to this, the employees should segregate and label things as
Necessary, Critical, Most Important, Not Needed Now, Useless etc. The next step is to throwaway
what is Useless. Store what is Not Needed Now for the moment. And Critical as well as Most
Important items should be kept strategically. For e.g. the medical store owner keeps the stock of
critical and most important drugs nearer to the counter while rarely used drugs are kept at the
end of the shop.
• Seition: It stands for Organise. Most of employee time is wasted in searching items, if they
organize it such that every item has its own space and should be kept in that place only, then time
wasted in searching can be better utilised. For e.g. the tools in Toyota factory are organised and
placed so that workers don’t have to waste time in searching the equipment. This has latter been
introduced in field of Medical Surgery where the tools are organised and kept ready to reduce the
time of surgery and utilise the surgeon to maximum
• Seiso: It stands for Shine the work place. A clean working environment maximises the efficiency.
Also if your work station is cluttered you won’t be able to find things and will delay the output.
For e.g. the local garage is always cluttered and not clean, where as a professionally managed
garage is kept clean and uncluttered and your vehicle requires less time to be processed at a
professional garage.
• Seiketsu: It stands for standardisation. When a company standardises the methods, rules, policies
etc. it functions flawlessly. For e.g. The customer support teams have Standard Operating
Procedure documents, this reduces time to get to the root cause and it also ensures similar
customer experience to everyone.
• Shitsuke: It stands for Self-Discipline. This ensures that employees respect the organization
policies and adhere to it. This has more to do with generating pride amongst employees and less
to the efficiency but this helps organization and efficiency indirectly. For e.g. We at Jamnalal Bajaj
focus on discipline and timeliness and this has given our college a culture which imbibes pride in
us and we can be differentiated from other b school students easily.

Kaizen focuses on small improvements like these which impact on company’s overall performance by huge
margins and that is the reason behind success of Kaizen and many Japanese firms. One of the important
aspect of Kaizen is to continuously monitor if the changes are being followed and then act accordingly to
make it more efficient. This makes the implementation of Kaizen following PDCA cycle, i.e. Plan-Do-Check-
Act. It means you plan the strategy to make changes, you implement the changes, check if it is up to the
mark and make necessary changes to make it better. This is the whole concept of continuous
improvements.
Advantages of Kaizen:

• Improves teamwork, employee satisfaction and efficiency.

• Builds leadership skills.
• Helps in waste reduction and better safety.

Limitations of Kaizen:

• Difficult to implement in existing systems.

• Change is difficult and could cause friction amongst employees.
• Few unmotivated employees could cause a problem in the whole system.
• It is hard to keep employees motivated to do continuous improvements.

The limitations of Kaizen can be easily dealt with by effectively managing the strategy and workforce and
also slowly doing the changes. The advantages outweigh the limitations by a huge margin and hence it is
a good tool. Also there is a good future scope for this strategy as the world is moving towards innovation
and the small changes and attention to detail is of key importance for that.