The Kaizen Business

One of the key concepts to come out of kaizen and lean business practices is constantly evaluating processes to eradicate waste. You see waste is a money sucker, when it occurs it is literally draining money and profit from your business. When you get rid of waste profit goes up.

So what is waste exactly? These are the classic 7 wastes you should always be on the lookout for in your business:

Overproduction
Inventory
Waiting
Defects
Transportation
Processing
Motion

Now if you know much about the background of kaizen you will notice that these have been adopted from traditional manufacturing types of businesses. But it doesn’t stop there, another way to define waste is any process performed in your business that the customer is not paying for… I like that much better as it doesn’t pigeon hole you into thinking kaizen is only for brick and mortar manufacturers.

By far the two biggest wasters can occur in your business in the form of inventory and overproduction. When it comes to products I create and distribute in this business I have pretty much solved that issue using a service like Kunaki. They only produce what is ordered and they make it when it’s ordered… totally awesome and totally lean!

Defects are really problematic as well. How many times have you sat down to start making your next product just to stop midway through because you got interrupted or messed something up from incomplete documentation. Just like the manufacturing shop floor you now have to re-work the defect so the customer won’t notice it or even worse throw out all that work and start over. Can you say lost time and money!

Processing is certainly an area I have identified and improved upon in article writing. Loosely defined processing means doing much more than is necessary. Now when I write I don’t redo my articles over and over editing them or trying to perfect them. Once I have a topic in mind with a few key points to address I sit down and pound them out almost entirely as if I am talking with someone about the subject. After an article is completed I will go back once or twice and make sure I didn’t make any glaring mistakes and then off it goes to an ezine or newsletter publisher, topical website or it shows up here on the blog.

So what waste do you have in your business? If you are in an Internet business stop fooling yourself thinking you don’t have waste. The time to eliminate it is now, otherwise it’s just draining you of money.

-Jim Sansi