English version below
Viele mittelständische Unternehmen haben Schwierigkeiten die gewünschten Erfolge Ihrer Kaizen Bemühungen zu ernten. Sie wundern sich warum die Projekte so lange dauern und die Ergebnisse am Ende doch nicht so sind, wie gedacht. In diesem Beitrag möchte ich verdeutlichen, wie solche Probleme zu stande kommen und was Sie dagegen tun können.
Die Idee von „Kaizen“ ist es, kontinuierlich durch viele kleine Verbesserungen besser zu werden.
Die meisten Unternehmen sind in Ihrer Entwicklung aber nicht so weit.
Selbst bei Toyota stammen die meisten Produktivitätssteigerungen von Kaizen-Events, bei denen eine handvoll Leute fokussiert an einem Projekt arbeiten.
Viele Unternehmen haben im Glauben etwas in Richtung „Kaizen-Kultur“ zu tun, Kaizen-Teams gebildet, die an unterschiedlichen Themen im Unternehmen arbeiten. Meistens sind die treibenden Mitglieder dieser Kaizen-Teams in mehreren Teams beschäftigt und müssen viele Aufgaben gleichzeitig erarbeiten.
“ beschreibt der Autor Gene Kim, wie man die Theory of Constraints im IT Umfeld einsetzen kann.
Many SMEs have difficulties to get the desired results of their kaizen efforts. They wonder why projects take so long and results are not as expected in the end. In this post I will try illustrate why problems like this occur and what you can do about it.
The idea of “Kaizen“ is to continuously improve through many small improvements.
But most companies are not this far in their development at this time.
Even with Toyota most productivity gains were gained with Kaizen events, where a handful of people focused on a singular project / problem.
Many companies have tried to implement a „Kaizen Culture“. They formed kaizen teams, working on different topics all over the company. In most cases the driving members of those kaizen teams were working in multiple teams and had to work on many tasks simultaneously.
This approach obviously this approach is the one you want to follow to create a living kaizen culture. But many SMEs are experiencing problems with distributing the limited resources across the entire enterprise and still achieve the desired results.
In most cases, the projects take longer than scheduled and need more resources than planned.
In his book „The Phoenix Project
“ Gene Kim describes how to use the Theory of Constraints in IT environment.
One key message here is that the more WIP (work in process) in form of work packages is in the system, the longer the processing time of each task will be.
Precisely this phenomenon occurs with the tasks of your kaizen experts. The more tasks and projects these shoulders have, the longer their projects will take to get completed. Quite often a project will not only take longer, but it also costs more, since towards the end – in panic mode trying to keep the schedule – additional resources are beeing sucked into the project.
The solution to this problem of chronically delayed projects is according to the Theory of Constraints to regulate the flow of new projects depending on the capacity of the bottleneck resource. This way the flow of tasks is maximum.
A possible tool for visualization of the utilization of your bottleneck ressource „Kaizen Expert“ is a „Kanban Board“, which I described in an earlier post.
It shows which tasks are currently being worked on and which are wait for processing.
If you feel that your employees are working on too many things, partly overworked and stressed out and still not deliver the desired results. Ask yourself the questions whether you should reduce the amount of tasks for your experts to shorten the overall processing time.
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