Kaizen Institute Consulting Group.
Masaaki Imai founded Kaizen Institute in 1985 and went on to introduce KAIZEN to Western management. It operates in more than 30 countries today, with its Western Europe hub in Portugal. It's a founding shareholder of Kaizen Tech and the reason "Kaizen" is in our name.
Figures as published by Kaizen Institute. KAIZEN™ is a registered trademark of the Kaizen Foundation and its licensees; it is used here to identify the organisation and its methodology.
What Kaizen Institute does on a shop floor.
Their method is Gemba-first: observation and coaching happen on the floor while the line is running. The offerings below are the ones that touch an MES programme most directly.
Manufacturing operations
Consulting on production operations, flow and loss reduction — the operational content behind an OEE number.
Maintenance & TPM
Total Productive Maintenance and maintenance-regime design, moving plants off calendar-based routines.
Strategy deployment
Hoshin Kanri, using a Catchball process so sites co-create the plans they are asked to execute.
Daily management
Tiered meetings, visual dashboards, Gemba walks and coaching. These are the routines that decide whether anyone acts on a number.
Training & certification
Leaders programmes and certified training, including digital transformation and Industry 4.0.
Benchmarking
Best-practice tours and international study missions across industrial operations.
A system on top of an unreformed process just digitises the waste.
Kaizen Institute's own doctrine puts it plainly: improve the process before you digitalise it, and don't automate work that should have been eliminated. We agree, and it costs us scope. On joint work the sequence is theirs first and ours second, and the measurement we install is what proves whether their change held.
01 · BEFORE WE CONFIGURE ANYTHING
They run the loss analysis and the standard work. We watch, because the loss categories they land on become the downtime reason codes in the MES. Get that list wrong and every Pareto for the next five years is wrong with it.
02 · WHILE WE BUILD
We instrument the losses at source and attribute each one to an asset, a cause and a shift. They design the tiered meeting that will consume it: who reads what, at what time, with authority to do what. Neither half is worth much on its own.
03 · AFTER GO-LIVE
Adoption is our deliverable as much as uptime, so we measure whether operators are using it. They audit whether the routine still happens in month nine, once the novelty's gone and the plant manager has changed.
04 · THE SAME ARGUMENT, TWICE
Their Hoshin Kanri and Catchball process is a site helping shape the plan it's given. Our template governance is the same argument in software: corporate template versus local reality. When both sides are in the room, it gets settled once instead of relitigated at every site.
On joint work the division is: they own the operating model and the behaviours, we own the architecture, the integration and the system that has to run every shift.