When implementing a Kaizen implementation strategy, it is essential to create a culture of continuous improvement. 

There are three critical components of a culture of continuous improvement: 

1. Aligning goals with business strategy.
2. Creating an operational excellence team.
3. Establishing the culture.

These steps will help you create a successful Kaizen implementation. If you want to make your organization an operational excellence champion, follow these steps. You'll soon be on your way to building a culture of continuous improvement!
 
Aligning goals with business strategy
Aligning goals with your business strategy is the first step in implementing a Kaizen program. This process emphasizes the need for constant improvement. Kaizen methods have helped many organizations increase employee productivity and lower costs, while improving customer service and satisfaction. The ultimate goal of any organization is operational excellence, and Kaizen implementation is one way to achieve it. While projects and tools can help, a true culture change can be achieved with Kaizen. All employees are encouraged to participate in the improvement process. 
 
The next step is to align goals with the overall business strategy. Developing an operational excellence mindset requires the company to align its goals with its business strategy. By doing this, all members can see the value flow through the business. Moreover, successful implementation of Kaizen practices requires businesses to focus on improving their value proposition and delivery. 

​​Now let's take a look at the second critical component of continuous improvement culture- creating an operational excellence (OpEx) team.

Creating an operational excellence team
​Creating an operational excellence team will require a commitment to a vision that is aligned with the company's strategic objectives. The vision can be product or growth-oriented, or even market-focused. It should be communicated to all employees, to ensure alignment of effort and resources. Once all employees are on board with the new strategy, implementation will be easier. However, a company wide OpEx strategy will require time, resources, and education to be successful.
 
Before implementing any improvement initiative, a company should define an optimal value stream and work toward achieving it. Once a company has defined the optimal value stream, it should select a project that is both timely and effective. The company should then expand its operational excellence team by hiring more staff and establishing a portfolio of improvement projects. This team should be rewarded for its accomplishments and recognize the individual contributions of its frontline operational excellence leaders.
 
In order to implement a Kaizen implementation successfully, an organization must first determine what operational excellence is. To determine if a process meets those criteria, management must identify the problem and determine how to resolve it. An effective operational excellence team must be committed to bringing changes and identifying recurring problems. However, the team must be willing to embrace change and sacrifice old ways of doing things. It is vital to measure progress and make sure everyone understands what it means to achieve the goals.
 
When implementing a Kaizen program, companies must realize that they cannot achieve operational excellence without aligning their goals with the organization's strategic objectives. Without this alignment, improvement efforts tend to float in circles, with little or no strategic impact. Ultimately, it is imperative to align goals with strategic objectives. Only then can Kaizen efforts benefit the entire organization and its customers.

Coming to the third critical component of continuous improvement culture- establishing the culture of continuous improvement at your workplace. 
 
Creating a culture of continuous improvement
Creating a culture of continuous improvement is important, but how do you make it stick? The key is to get everyone involved. Rather than enlisting the help of managers and top executives, employees should make suggestions for improvement. While not every suggestion will be successful, many will. Employees are most familiar with areas that need improving, so gaining their input can be invaluable. Below are some tips for making Kaizen work at your organization. 
 
Commitment:
Kaizen requires the commitment of every member of the organization. There must be no "us versus us" mentality. All must work toward the same goal. For example, some automobile factories hold daily meetings of small teams to discuss one small change that can improve a process. This process must be conducted regularly, daily, and in a routine. Once implemented, the company will be on the road to continuous improvement.
 
Motivation:
Employees should be encouraged to take responsibility for the quality of their work. Kaizen will improve processes while instilling a sense of teamwork and ownership. Employees will be motivated to work on the problems they select and will be more likely to find a solution if everyone is involved in it. A recent published study revealed that only 36% of US workers were engaged in their work, while 15% were ‘actively disengaged’. Globally, 20% of employees are engaged at work. Getting employees involved in the process of continuous improvement will improve processes, reduce turnover, and boost innovation.

​Read more on Kaizen here.

If you are a leader looking to drive change and achieve operational excellence in your chemical organization, you may be asking yourself how to improve operational efficiencies in your company. 

Here are few important steps to take in this regard:

Advanced Process Control (APC) Implementation in the chemical industry can help you maximize margins and meet customer expectations.

APC is a process control and optimization technology that takes into account the multivariable interactive nature of process units to reduce variability and drive the process to an optimum.  APC includes model-based software used to control the process operation. It is also known as multivariable predictive control (MPC) or model predictive control.

APC's goal is to improve the control of production processes. APC helps simplify production and makes production output more predictable by ensuring that processes are under constant control.

You can achieve operational excellence in your organization with an APC implementation by following a detailed plan that takes into account the needs of your business and the requirements of your customers. Here are three things to consider when planning your APC implementation:

The first step in addressing the issue of operating efficiency is to recognize how value creation is rooted in individual chemical segments. Companies that have more than one business unit must differentiate their operating models and determine how corporate operations can influence the performance of these units. The second step involves determining which role corporate plays in day-to-day operations. Centralized operations stifle differentiation, while giving autonomy to each business unit can help it succeed.

Once you've mapped out the key components of your operational efficiency strategy, you'll need to decide on your next steps. Consider training operators and retaining knowledge. Also, consider mobile-enabled augmented reality and enterprise decision-support. While you can achieve operational excellence in your company by enhancing any one/ all of these four components, you'd be missing out on the true potential of these these components if you don’t control or eliminate wastes. Comprehensive operational excellence strategies provide immediate savings while driving excellence in the future.

Checkout- Top Ten Strategic Decision-Making Tools for Operational Excellence

While it's important to recognize that organic revenue growth is slowing down in several countries around the world, technical (e.g. additive manufacturing) and economic disruptions have hit various segments of the industry. For example, increased emphasis on circular economy and regionalization have impacted the petrochemical industry. Specialty chemicals, which focus on tailoring materials for specific applications, are now under threat. Further, the COVID-19 crisis has added further uncertainty to the supply chain, requiring additional investments and a broader outlook.

​Top Ten Strategic Decision-Making Tools for Operational Excellence book is your Go-To Reference Guide to increase Operational Excellence at your workplace.

The top ten tools described in this book are popular for strategic decision-making. However, they also offer another significant advantage, and that is- Operational Excellence gets multiplied manyfold when these tools are applied to various business processes in an organization. And this book tells you exactly how to do that!

Not many companies have explored this benefit. But as a successful Operational Excellence and Continuous Improvement Consultant, I’m using these tools for over two decades, so can say that they work super!

This book describes the top ten strategic decision-making tools for improving operational excellence and how to use them right. Also presented are several illustrations and examples from different industry sectors to elaborate and explain the concepts.

So as a decisionmaker, executive or a business-owner, you would like to take your organization on the growth mode, improve business resilience and operating efficiency, increase revenue and profit, then this book is for you!
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Available as Paperback and digital editions on Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble and other popular stores worldwide!

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Post Covid-19, numerous organizations are letting their employees telecommute. A few companies have chosen to have 50-90% of their people work distantly through phone, PC frameworks, video conferencing and so on. 

According to an article published on Forbes.com Coinbase, Google, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Capital One, Zillow, Slack, Amazon, PayPal, Salesforce and other major companies are leading the ‘work from home’ revolution.

While such a move guarantees operational cost-savings and continued productivity (thru the pandemic); remote working has its own bundle of difficulties both for the employee as well as the company.

For instance, you may need to set up procedures to ensure that there is no disturbance because of children or pets at the employee's home or some woodwork clamor originating from their neighbor's home.

People ordinarily are social creatures. Working continually from home or distant places can have unfavorable impact on the employee’s output, personality and in extreme cases, even on their psychological wellness.

Organizations seeking to change over huge amount of its work through far-off tasks should necessarily assess their employee's capacity to bear distant working before allotting them remote work duties. Comparative test must be accomplished for every new hire. Hence, HR processes, recruitment, employee development, learning processes must be appropriately amended prior to changing traditional working norms to remote operations.

Another challenge to remote working is changed operational framework. For example, computer systems, software, cloud-based working platform, ERP, cyber-security, eLearning platforms and so on.

Drawing process maps for every single business process, division wise and also cross-functional processes will help identify potential challenges to transitions from conventional working to remote operations.

Employing Kaizen to bring -on such transitions will not only augment smooth transition, but also bring-on the change effectively, lower costs and increase employee morale.

Kaizen is a time-tested Japanese business improvement methodology. It got popularity after it was implemented by Japanese auto companies to rise from economic downturn post world-war II.

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As per media reports, the company also has had recent issues with debris in its other products i.e. 787 Dreamliners and KC-46A military refueling tankers, which led to two suspensions of deliveries of KC-46As to the US air force.

Foreign object debris, an industrial term for rags, tools, metal shavings and other materials left behind by workers during the assembly line aircraft production process, can raise the risk of electrical short-circuiting and fires.

This typically results from poor employee training coupled with near non-existent in-process quality control systems!

A culture of Kaizen helps bigtime in such cases. Kaizen-based installation of quality systems are extremely effective for all types of workplaces be it- production, assembly-line or service functions. Moreover, combining Kaizen with mistake-proofing tools such as Poka Yoke, the product’s quality as well as safety are further augmented.

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A business process improvement project within an organization usually starts out with statements like “We have this problem and we think this is the issue that must be sorted out”. In my experience, 9 times out of 10, the cause of the problem is radically different from what one ‘thinks’ is the issue. Hence, the precursor to choosing a process improvement project is to acknowledge that there is a problem whose root cause(s) must be first be identified before going any further with the process improvement idea.

Once you have an idea of the ‘real’ issue(s) or the ‘root cause(s)’ which must be addressed, you must establish what sort of improvement you are seeking. Because a goal provides the  context for determining as well as designing  an action plan. For example, the improvement steps to save $1000 via a process improvement campaign are obviously far different from the steps to save $100,000 or $1M - but that’s also the only way you can draw a project's finishing line and establish whether that project was a success.
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Also, the journey for reaching goals may vary and the execution plan documents the road map for achieving the goal.
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All popular continuous improvement methodologies such as Lean, Six Sigma, Hoshin Kanri, Lean Six Sigma, Kaizen , Kanban etc. incorporate the same focus on setting goals that are easily understood, across an organization.
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Kaizen in an ancient continual improvement methodology. Kaizen is time-tested and gives exponential results. It is also the most economical technique to implement, hence best for start-ups and small size organizations, since these companies usually have a constraint on funds. 

Folklore mentions a story around Kaizen. The story goes-

Once upon a time, a village was struck with severe drought. Everyone had to walk huge distances from their homes to the river to fetch a pail of water. Men and women, young and old, everyone had to walk miles to get just one pail of drinking water. And they had to do this chore everyday  ...

One day, the village head observed a small boy of 4- 5 years carrying a small pot of water. He was walking along with his mom, who was carrying a bigger pot of water for their home. The sight of a young kid having to suffer so much for water disturbed the village head. He got around thinking ... what can be done so we minimize the effort to get water?

He then came up with a plan. In the evening he called a meeting of all villagers and said "all of us are struggling to get water, even the kids and it pains me. So, why not all of us pool ourselves so that each one of us does only a bit, daily, and when the efforts add-up we get our reward" i.e. drinking water!

So then on, each person was placed at strategic distance and transferred pots of water from point-to-point. They rotated people so as to evenly distribute workload. This solved the problem ... small increments done over time added-up to bring big reward i.e. water. That's the history of Kaizen.

Kaizen methodology was applied to industrial setting by Dr. Deming. He first applied Kaizen in Japan's auto company Toyota motors. Since then Kaizen has spread its wings to other industry verticals. Want to know more on industrial Kaizen? Checkout this video ...

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