Kaizen vs. Kaikaku. What should be your production improvement strategy ?

I can read endless debates on each approach claiming one is better than the other. Hereunder I am trying to give some hints on that subject.

I guess you are familiar with both but in short:

• Kaizen is a philosophy and set of tools to organize every process in order to continuously improve it (improvement in Japanese language)
• Kaikaku (radical change in Japanese language) is basically the approach to realize an investment in order to, brutaly, improve the performance of a given process
• Both imply a long term approach, kaizen because it is continuously running everywhere in the company and step improvements because you are planning a return of your investment in time.

Now, what's best ? The answer is easy: "you absolutely need both" and here is why:

• If you continuously improve a process, you will reach an end of the potential improvement and therefore will only be able to duplicate the process if you are short in capacity. It's not really a problem but it might lead to a higher level of investment since you will duplicate / triplicate / n-plicate the investment to cope with the needs.
• If you do no kaizen, your process efficiency will slowly but surely decay and you will be forced to invest again and, again, your new investment will follow the same trend.
• Therefore the only way to secure your productivity and return on investment is to combine Kaikaku and Kaizen.

You still have a doubt ? Very easy, do a business case audit !

This will prove once and for all that your return on investment depend on kaizen.

It will convince your finance and production departments to continuously do both:

• Production should invest and improve its production means
• Finance should audit and monitor that this is money and time well spend

Kaizen and Kaikaku are the 2 legs of process improvement, you need your two legs to win a race.