J-PLEASE READ THE BELOW ESSAY AND WRITE A SUBSTANTIVE 300 WORD REPLY Make sure that you are adding new and relevant information with each this reply.

 PLEASE READ THE BELOW  ESSAY AND WRITE A SUBSTANTIVE 300 WORD REPLY   Make sure that you are adding new and relevant information with each this reply.

Kaizen is a philosophy that will encompass multiple ideas; however, Kaizen often is an event. It is highly applicable to manufacturing industries where things are made on a factory floor. It originates from Japan as it is a Japanese word (Doolen, Van Aken, Farris, Worley & Huwe, 2008) but, the concepts and philosophy of Kaizen are what has enabled Toyota to be both a quality and a cost leader.

I have traditionally worked for smaller companies because I prefer the company culture found there. I have some experience with quality in a manufacturing context. I have been exposed to many of the words found in the textbook, and I can honestly say that chapter 3 is clearing up the alphabet soup of terms. The most difficult concept for me personally is the concept of continuous improvement because in the past we worked on one problem (opportunity) at a time, and when we were finished we may do nothing about improvement for several months because it seemed to keep costs lower that way.

The nature of Kaizen is that of a strategy, though it deals with single events to make improvements. Repeated events will improve processes continuously, but in fact is similar to a step function applied to multiple business processes. By having cycles of improvements, it drives a continuous business process improvement philosophy (Doolen, T., et al., 2008, p. 639). It involves cross functional teams, and executive buy in (support) is generally required to be successful. Often the team members are empowered to solve the problem as stated without management approval. The manager becomes a facilitator and not a gatekeeper.

Toyota, for the most part has been a very large major player in the markets that it participates in, however smaller companies cannot afford hundreds of millions of dollars to implement TQM, but small companies certainly benefit from improved quality, and reduced waste. Smaller companies typically selectively target the areas of improvement and find out the costs involved in implementing specific quality improvements. Perhaps it is possible to apply the philosophy to smaller companies.

Smaller companies need to know how much it costs, both before and after a quality process improvement. They have limited financial resources, and not every dollar spent on quality improvements will pay for itself. Often the investment is worth the expenditure. “Yearly reporting of total quality costs is not efficient for making decisions on these costs” (Kirlioglu & Cevik, 2013, p.98). Therefore, implementing cost of quality reporting is beneficial and will guide smaller companies as they grow and improve quality.

Vietnam is a developing country that recently hosted a peace summit involving the US President and Chairman Kim of North Korea. It is bustling with energy and business is booming. Nguyen (2019) suggests that it can be successfully applied to small companies. “Kaizen has been well transferred to Vietnam since early 1990s…there are some differences in the practicalimplementation of Kaizen among Japanese-owned companies…and foreign and local ones, many of them have well recognized the importance of Kaizen for their development” (Nguyen, 2019, p. 2). Of particular importance is the environment, where the internal environment where the workers do their job is an important factor as is the external physical environment.

As regards a more environmentally friendly future which is taking shape as an area of interest to politics and the press recently in the United States (US), it could be that the business environment may quickly change to address climate change. If this event occurs there will be large shifts in priorities. One of the ways of organizing in a green environment is to use integrated management systems (IMS). IMS has six pillars of which the sixth pillar is Kaizen, a term which is used interchangeably with continuous process improvement (Nunhes, Bernardo & Oliveira, 2019). The idea of IMS, is one of a future system to manage systems and having Kaizen as part of the framework is a fundamental shift in the way most businesses have operated, because Kaizen is used on the administration portion of the organization.

Having Kaizen as a pillar, suggests that it becomes a philosophy that guides an organization. Toyota is famous for exposing the ideas, and much of the world seems to have adopted it within the manufacturing sector. I see increasing applications to other fields such as medicine and healthcare. The idea of Kaizen as a philosophy comes from roots in Zen Buddhism (Chiarini, Baccarani, & Mascherpa, 2018). Others interpret the philosophy as a strategic advantage that is used by a business (Marin-Garcia, Juarez-Tarraga, & Santandreu-Mascarell, 2018), and the advantage concerns the workers by involving them in significant details of the operations where they reap rewards for their involvement.

References

Chiarini, A., Baccarani, C., & Mascherpa, V. (2018). Lean production, Toyota production system and kaizen philosophy. The TQM journal, 30(4), 425-438. doi:10.1108/TQM-12-2017-0178

Doolen, T., Van Aken, E., Farris, J., Worley, J., & Huwe, J. (2008). Kaizen events and organizational performance: a field study. International journal of productivity and performance management, 57(8), 637-658.

Kirlioglu, H., & Cevik, Z. (2013). Measuring and reporting cost of quality in a Turkish manufacturing company: A case study. Journal of economic and social studies, 3(2), 87-100.

Marin-Garcia, J. A., Juarez-Tarraga, A., & Santandreu-Mascarell, C. (2018). Kaizen philosophy: The keys of the permanent suggestion systems analyzed from the workers’ perspective. The TQM journal, 30(4), 296-320. doi:10.1108/TQM-12-2017-0176

Nguyen, T. (2019). STEAM-ME: A novel model for successful kaizen implementation and sustainable performance of SMEs in Vietnam. Complexity, 2019, 1-23. doi:10.1155/2019/6048195

Nunhes, T. V., Bernardo, M., & Oliveira, O. J. (2019). Guiding principles of integrated management systems: Towards unifying a starting point for researchers and practitioners. Journal of cleaner production, 210, 977-993. doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.11.066