This question may arise when we completely don’t know how to implement it, or there is no need to make a change of current tool. Well, we don’t have to force ourself to always make a change if it isn’t necessary.
We need to make a change only when we have problem with current ones. So, how to change, in other words, implement kaizen, effectively?
There are three doors need to be opened when we want to implement kaizen effectively.
The next step of kaizen is Seiton. This concept is dealing with how we arrange things so that it make us easy to get those things right away once we need them. It is clear that it involves at least two actions; how we keep those things and standard of how urgent we need them.
It sounds easy but, in fact, difficult to do. How long you spent your time in searching what you’re looking for? Did you get it at the first place?
In Japan, a common rule in finding things is within 30 seconds. It means, time needed to go to the place where things we need is located, grab them and back to the initial place, all within 30 seconds.
Many of us might think that this kind of activity is a dull, not important and non hi-tech related thinking. But, have we ever thought of how much time we can save if don’t have to search when we need anything? Sometimes we have to spend minutes for searching files we want in thousands or millions of files in our hard disk. Of course we can use search tool. But wouldn’t it be better if we just go to the right folder and get the files right away? So, for the computer freak like us, start to manage folder and files properly.Take a look at the stuffs around you. You might have things that you don’t really need them, or even you might not know that you have them.
Well, Japanese people have a good tool in order to “get rid of” this problem. They call it “red tag” movement. Below are steps to guide us to implement red tag movement.
Provide come pieces of tags, (of course, they must not in red, we can use any color, as long the same color for all tags). <!–adsensestart–>
At the beginning of a period of implementation, put tag on things that we think at the gray area. For example, at the beginning of the month, week, or any period that we decided.
Each time we use them, remove the tag
At the end of the period, we will easily know which stuffs are still needed and which ones are not.
Scrutinize stuffs that still there is tag on it. Decide whether those are still needed or not. If not, get rid of it, if yes, let them there (still with tag on it)
Start the process from the first step. We may need to prolong the process in order to ensure us before throwing unneeded stuffs after the first round of process.