Quailty, Kaizen, KanBan,JIT, What's does it all mean?

When you first start looking at 'quality', or even the idea of improving your company, it is often overwhelming all of the 'buzz phrases' that are out there. Words like Kaizen, KanBan, JIT, and lots more are thrown around like confetti at a wedding. Here's a few explanations 'in a nutshell'. These will not turn you into a guru, but at least you may feel a little more confident in what people are talking about.

First of, many of these 'strange' words are Japaneese. The story goes..that many moons ago, an American had some cool ideas about how to improve business productivity and make money. However, no one would listen to his ideas, so he moved to Japan where the people were much more receptive. His name was Demming. The Japanese implemented his ideas and through this process developed several important quality processes, ideas and philosophies, and thus we have these 'quality words' in our vocabulary today.

Guru:  (Means Teacher). We take Guru in every day usage to mean 'an expert in the field' that we hold with high respect. It is often used in both Computer (IT) as well as with in Quality.

Kaizen: (Continual Improvement). More literally, it could be 'school of wisdom'. It is the "simple" idea that great improvement can be accomplished by ongoing (continuous) small improvements and suggestions. A simple example in business would be a system to get input from all employees (regardless of position) with all kinds of suggestions across all areas, Production, Marketing, Sales, Administrative, etc, and implement those ideas over time. Kaizen can be applied to everyday life and related to small changes you make in your lifestyle that can make big changes in the long run.

KanBan (Signal Cards): Somewhat related to JIT (below). KanBan is an inventory movement system especially good where their are high volume of orders / low value (unit cost) of the order. It is an excellent for fast customer response. Think of it like one of those ' new Internet Refrigerators'. As you take milk out of the fridge, the fridge keeps track of how much milk is left, and automatically re-orders more milk for you, so that you experience little or no milk shortages. KanBan is credited as being originally designed by Toyota as part of their 'lean manufacturing system'

JIT (Just In Time): We can use a similar analogy to a Just In Time system as the example above, the idea is that we have our inventory just when we needed it. The goal is not carry as little inventory as necessary to meet demand. It is important to note that JIT and KanBan are not exactly the same. There is more to managing a JIT system than just Kanban and there is more to Kanban than just inventory management.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of some of these terms, and may wish to research more. At the very least I hope that the next time you hear some of these words you won't run over and hide by the water cooler :-)