Kaizen Process Improvement Assignment - Essay Example

Q1: What did you notice went well and what “wastes” were created during this process in rounds and 2? During the first round, we were able to establish rapport of working together as a group and identify the process flow that would be most suitable. In the second round, we fine tuned these even more and switched from the assembly line to a swifter method of making the plane – optimally made with the efforts of two people. The wastes identified were unnecessary movement, underutilized people, time loss due to misdirection and over-processing. ? Q2: Did the team appear to address the wastes that you identified during round 3?

We successfully addressed the wastes that we had identified in the previous rounds: Processing was more efficient, time wasn’t lost and every one had a job to do, with pretty much everyone putting in an equal amount of effort. ? Q3: In what ways did the team engage or not engage in Kaizen as the game progressed? We successfully identified some wastes and dealt with them. We were also constantly reflecting on our work for problems and incorporating changes throughout the process. We failed to evaluate the entire value stream though: the team should have identified the value that the product was supposed to generate for the ‘customer’.

In this scenario, the goal was to have the most number of planes in the bucket, rather than quality of the planes. Thus, the first thing that the team should have argued on, before round three, was that the customer wanted quantity. It did not matter if the creases of the plane were fine enough, or the nose of the plane was sharp enough – ‘the customer’ wanted more planes in the bucket. There ended up being too much undelivered goods by way of wasted planes on the floor, rather than bucket. ? Q4: If we continued, what would your suggestions be for new process improvements for the team?

Look at the entire value stream. In the last step, a lot of fully manufactured planes were wasted because they could not be correctly dumped into the basket. This means, the completely manufactured product was lost in the final stage, just before delivery to the customer. Every team had pretty much the same number of planes made, 44 on an average. The team with minimal waste and the highest number of planes in the box was the one which had the least number of planes made (i.e. 42) – the point to note is that it did not matter in the end how many planes the team made – what mattered was that how many actually made it to the basket.

For application purposes, how many were actually delivered to the customer. Production kept increasing in every round but delivery was faulty. ? Consider the Kaizen improvement process and the concepts of Lean. Identify one problem in your workplace (or in your life if you are not employed). Apply the concepts of lean and examine how you might be able to use the Kaizen process improvement approach to improve this process. My sales team has around four to five persons. Each is individually working on identifying potential clients, approaching them, making the sale and doing the documentation.

As a team, we have to report the number of sales made at the end of the day. Using Kaizen techniques, we should break down the overall process and put process responsibilities on individuals. For example, one person to identify potential clients and set up meetings, another two meet them and make the sales pitch and the final one do all the documentation work. This will bring expertise, team work and reduce waste in terms of over-processing and unproductive use of resources.