What Kaizen means and why you need it
Refining the work culture at your workplace can play an important role in optimizing processes, increasing resilience, and quadrupling profitability. Take a moment to analyze how “change” happens in your organization or workplace? Is it a sudden occurrence, a contingency plan in a desperate attempt to renew resources? Or is it a part of the ongoing way you work?
Depending on the type of change, you may need to emulate a certain custom and request months of hard work, big budgets, and upheaval. However, an alternative and almost entirely complementary process of improving systems can happen through subtle and never-ending, infinite loops of improvement. This is the concept of kaizen.
What does Kaizen mean?
Quality management is the core discipline that binds the fabrics of a business and the central term of quality management according to lean principles is Kaizen. “Kaizen” is a Japanese term that is composed of the terms “Kai”, which stands for change, and “Zen”, which means “good”. Therefore it is casually referred to as a “good change” or a “change for the better”.
Kaizen is a remarkable business philosophy that encourages continuous improvement, creating gradual improvements that never end and is transferable to everything. Instead of focusing on sudden improvement, the concept of kaizen sees improvement in productivity as a methodical process.
Employees at all levels of the company work together proactively to achieve continuous improvement in wide-set increments. It not only helps combine the collective talents within a company but also ensures employee engagement, making their jobs more fulfilling, less strenuous, and safer.
Why do you need Kaizen?
Kaizen is a highly satisfactory process where the improvement is measured in small doses. For example, I completed the work I had previously set for 5 days, in a day and a half. What this helped me achieve was a better-optimized treatment and ordering system.
The appointment types and appointment intervals were restructured, the billing improved, the material order revised, the employees trained, the delegation introduced and costs saved. And this did not happen through layoffs. Additionally, patient satisfaction increased substantially due to faster and better results. Waiting times shortened and sales quadrupled after just 12 months!
With kaizen, you can also achieve the following key skills for an improved business:
- Less waste
- Higher patient satisfaction
- Improved employee dedication
- Improved patient retention
- Quality competitiveness
- Improved problem solving
- Self-sufficient team
If you consistently operate Lean Orthodontics® and take your quality management seriously, make it a priority and see your team act the way you do, then you will surely succeed!