The Improvement Engine: Creativity and Innovation Through Employee Involvement--The Kaizen Teian

Employee involvement has repeatedly proven itself to be the key to any successful continuous improvement program. But to make an employee-driven improvement system work requires careful planning, management, training, guidance, and documentation. This new book offers all that, in a clear, concise but complete presentation.

The Improvement Engine deals with the two aspects of successful programs developed first in Japan: Kaizen, the goal of continuous incremental improvement, and Teian, the process of involving employees in reaching the goal. The book outlines an approach any company, division, unit, manager, kaizen promoter, or team leader can take to establish and utilize a kaizen teian program. Based on years of development in numerous companies, it presents methods for surfacing ideas about improvements in the organization and making people more conscious of opportunities for implementing additional improvements.

The book provides a framework for understanding kaizen and suggestions, including:

• offering a model "kaizen sheet" tool for documenting improvements
• presenting examples to guide the promotion, education, and implementation of a kaizen teian system.
• As well, you will learn to discern between what shouldn't be done, what must be done, and what you'd benefit by doing. You will also learn why using this simple, disciplined approach helps you get to the core of a problem quickly, thereby reaping the benefits of improvement much more rapidly.

This book will provide you with an in-depth understanding of successful employee suggestion systems for continuous improvement. Using the Japanese model, you will learn to develop employee talents through suggestion activity.

Chapter 1 : When Abolishing a Traditional Suggestion System is The Best Thing to Do
Chapter 2 : Clarifying The Difference Between Traditional Suggestion Systems and The Kaizen Teian System
Chapter 3 : The Huge Difference Between Kaizen Reporting and Traditional Suggestion Systems
Chapter 4 : The Kaizen Sheet as a Tool for Continuous Improvement and Skill Development and The Teian Sheet as a Tool for Data Collection
Chapter 5 : Keep Rules and Regulations Simple and Flexible
Chapter 6 : A Simple Evaluation Standard for First-Stage Kaizen
Chapter 7 : Principles of Upper-Grade Evaluations
Chapter 8 : From Unconscious Improvement to Conscious Improvement
Chapter 9 : Priming The Improvement Pump
Chapter 10 : Using The Kaizen Sheet to Understand Problems Clearly
Chapter 11 : A Positive Tool for Employee Development and Evaluation
Chapter 12 : People, Not Ideas, are a Company's Greatest Asset
Chapter 13 : Innovation, Kaizen, and Small Group Activities
Chapter 14 : The Promotion of Kaizen Activities Begins and Ends With Practical Examples
Chapter 15 : Kaizen Teian Examples