From the course: Operational Excellence Foundations

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Lean event, Kaizen, or workout

Lean event, Kaizen, or workout

- Have you ever wished if you could only gather the right people together, put them all in a room, and pick their brains to address a problem or to improve on one area or process. Well now you can. It's called a kaizen. Kaizen comes from a Japanese term. Loosely translated, it's change for the better or simply put, improvement. Sometimes it is called a lean event, a rapid improvement event, or a WorkOut. A few different names all describing the same thing. The term WorkOut was coined at GE. Essentially if you take unnecessary work out of the process to streamline and make it more efficient. Kaizen is a well organized, structured, and facilitated event to improve a work area, a department, a process, or an entire value stream. These rapid improvement events can vary from one to five days, depending on the objective and scope of the kaizen, such as to understand how the value stream flows or does not flow due to mistakes, delays, and bottlenecks in order to improve it, prioritize what's…

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