Here's a nice little video about the Toyota San Antonio plant…. start it at 1:20 and you hear a guy say:
“… the belief system is that it can always be better.”
The main guy from the video says, “Kaizen is continuous improvement. Kaizen is all around our shop.”
How do you get Kaizen to be all around your shop, or your hospital, or your software company?
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Mark Graban
Mark Graban is an internationally-recognized consultant, author, and professional speaker who has worked in healthcare, manufacturing, and startups. His latest book is Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More. He is author of the Shingo Award-winning books Lean Hospitals and Healthcare Kaizen, as well as The Executive Guide to Healthcare Kaizen. He also published the anthology Practicing Lean that benefits the Louise H. Batz Patient Safety Foundation, where Mark is a board member. Mark is also a Senior Advisor to the technology company KaiNexus.
Thanks for sharing Mark. Just a pity that at 1:11, despite the Kaizen belief system, there’s no projects on the project/PDCA board ;-). Unless they would have left this way of tracking and following up improvement efforts (but then again, why would it be there then?), such an empty board would trigger me to ask some questions to the shift supervisor for that area. Nobody’s perfect I guess…
Good catch. It could be an example of “nobody’s perfect” or maybe they took things down for the sake of the video shoot? I’d be surprised if they did that, actually, since it wouldn’t really be readable on screen.