We all aware that today, competition is becoming the most important element of the companies and the most important item of the compatibility is cost advantage. And we live this every day.

This situation causes that the perspective of the companies is changing from day to day. The companies now try to become advantageous with regards to price while to always make their operational productivity perfect to ensure sustainability.

For this, they are getting stronger from day to day with technologic investment and intellectual capital investments.

Operational productivity is a process requiring continuity and requesting patience. In this process it is not possible to be successful without human factor.

Here, one of the most important and efficient tools for ensuring the participation of this human factor is KAIZEN. Improvement can’t be complete and permanent without kaizen.

Kaizen is a Japanese origin word and means continuous improvement. Actually Kaizen, in a way, is the reflection the thought of always getting better which is a rule we can’t give up in our lives in the business life...

The most important point of kaizen thought it is the improvements made through small investments which are long termed, requiring patience and where the participation of the teams is necessary.

Instead of completely replacing and renewing an operating system and order, transforming with small steps and continuously would provide more permanent and more productive business results.

If we say why kaizen must be applied in an organization and what are its targets, we can answer as below:

The purposes of kaizen studies:

• Improving the work safety consciousness,
• Decreasing the errors and improving the quality,
• Decreasing the costs,
• Enabling the efficient team work,
• Increasing the interest for the work,
• Increasing the motivation of the employees,
• Increasing the loyalty of the employees for the company,
• Improving the people and the leadership skills.

Kaizen targets to eliminate and decrease the losses in all processes. In the end, there are losses everywhere there is production and these losses look right in our eyes. Since we sometimes ignore such losses, sometimes we can’t eliminate them even if we do something, we see this as if a normal situation.

Here, kaizen recommends us to always notice such losses and do an improvement, even if it is small, every day for eliminating the losses.

Toyota, thanks to this approach, reached the permanent success and obtained the target of being one of the biggest automobile producers of the world as the employees do kaizen every day and decrease the losses.

As we can see, kaizen actually comes in front of us at each point of our lives and always. The point which is important is looking with a different eye such that the losses are noticed and being able to ask ourselves every day this question: “What did I improve yesterday?”

Here, as from the moment we start to ask this question, we start to change the problems not going right even if in a small way.

Thanks.

Adnan YAZICI, Production and Planning Director