Masaaki Imai (born, 1930) is a Japanese organizational theorist and management consultant, known for his work on quality management, specifically on Kaizen.
Kaizen means ongoing improvement involving everybody, without spending much money.
Where there is no standard, there can be no improvement. For these reasons, standards are the basis for both maintenance and improvement
To assure the prosperity of a firm should be a long-term strategy and the turnover of key managers should be taken into account from the stand point of long-term consideration and not from the monthly or quarterly flavors.
Japanese management practices succeed simply because they are good management practices. This success has little to do with cultural factors. And the lack of cultural bias means that these practices can be - and are - just as successfully employed elsewhere.
Kaizen is like a hotbed that nurtures small and ongoing changes, while innovation is like magma that appears in abrupt eruptions from time to time
The Kaizen Philosophy assumes that our way of life - be it our working life, our social life, or our home life - deserves to be constantly improved.
I believe that management should focus on two particular areas. One is Gemba (shop floor) and the other is customer (not the shareholder).
There are various non-statistical tools that have been typically developed by lean companies, notably by Toyota for minimizing variability in production, such as standardization, introduction of takt time, synchronization, shortening the total production lead time which I am fond of referring to as non statistical tools.
Control charts are one of the statistical tools for solving quality related problems.
The standard is not writ on the stone. The definition of the standard is that it is the best way to do the job for now. It should be regarded as a next step to make further improvement.
Under the lean system, any tools which are required for solving problems are used.
All of management's efforts for Kaizen boil down to two words: customer satisfaction.
Progress is impossible without the ability to admit mistakes.
You can't do kaizen just once or twice and expect immediate results. You have to be in it for the long haul.
I have a theory that among the large Western companies (mostly American) the higher an executive is promoted, the more wisdom is lost and by the time he or she reaches the top becomes a complete idiot. Certainly they do not deserve the outrageous salary.
I am beginning to see a large-scale introduction of various management tools, philosophies and practices in the service sectors and have a high hope that it will become a global trend.
It is impossible to improve any process until it is standardized. If the process is shifting from here to there, then any improvement will just be one more variation that is occasionally used and mostly ignored. One must standardize, and thus stabilize the process, before continuous improvement can be made.
The message of the Kaizen strategy is that not a day should go by without some kind of improvement being made somewhere in the company.