What is Kaizen? In this blog post you learn about the kaizen culture, its added value to every company and its link to Kanban.

1. Culture of continuous
improvement
Kanban - Chapter 5

2. What is Kaizen?
• kai = „change“
• zen = „good“
• Kaizen is a culture of
continuous improvement
改
善

3. Goals of improvement
• focus on the process of improving quality,
productivity and customer satisfaction.
• involvement of all employees
• high social capital

4. Preconditions
• be able to make own decisions
• work and solving problems in the team
• acting without fear
• process oriented and systematic thinking
• active participation of the employees

5. Kanban and Kaizen

6. Kanban causes
• process transparency: motivation and responsibility
to keep up the workflow
• WIP limits cause Stop-the-Line mentality
• WIP limits: problems need to be solved in the team
• cross functional teams
• WIP limits and classes of service enable self
organization

7. Kanban as a forerunner
• improves cooperation
• increases social capital
• transparent process
• improvement and change is motivating and
spread virally

8. Kanban is the
perfect basis for a
Kaizen culture to evolve.

9. Conclusion
• KAIZEN means ‚continuous improvement‘
• creates transparency and shows the effects of
action and inaction
• WIP limits allow to pull work and make
prioritization for every involved person
• increase collaboration of swarming on problems