Kaizen Institute Consulting Group.
Kaizen Institute created the continuous-improvement consulting category. Founded in 1985 by Masaaki Imai — the author who introduced KAIZEN to Western management — it has spent four decades turning improvement from a slogan into a system of daily routines. It is 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.
Improvement as a system, not an initiative.
Their work is deliberately practical and Gemba-first — done on the floor where the work happens, not in a workshop room. 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 — the routines that make data get looked at.
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.
They change how people work.
We build the system that work runs on.
This is the partnership that keeps us honest about the thing MES vendors rarely admit: a technically flawless system deployed onto an unreformed process just digitises waste at higher resolution. Kaizen Institute's own doctrine says the same in reverse — improve the process before digitalising it, and avoid automating work that should have been eliminated.
KAIZEN INSTITUTE BRINGS
A documented improvement system for moving OEE — TPM, setup reduction, standard work — with decades of published results behind it.
WE BRING
OEE measured automatically at the source, with losses attributed to real causes rather than reconstructed in a spreadsheet the following week.
KAIZEN INSTITUTE BRINGS
Daily management routines — tiered meetings, visual boards, Gemba walks — that put a cadence around operational data.
WE BRING
The live data those routines run on. Adoption is our deliverable too; a dashboard nobody opens is a failed project on both sides.
KAIZEN INSTITUTE BRINGS
Hoshin Kanri and Catchball — cascading goals so each site helps shape its own plan rather than receiving one.
WE BRING
Template governance for multi-site rollouts, where the same tension appears as "corporate template versus local reality".
KAIZEN INSTITUTE BRINGS
Gemba-first observation as a working method — understand the process where it actually runs.
WE BRING
The same instinct applied to requirements: our Discovery phase is a shopfloor walk, not a requirements workshop.
Kaizen Institute also does digital transformation and Industry 4.0 advisory in its own right, so the boundary is not perfectly clean. The practical division on joint work: they own the operating model and the behaviours, we own the architecture, the integration and the system that has to run every shift.