Using manufacturing kaizen to improve a manufacturing process

Major businesses in South Africa have been trying to adopt new business initiatives in order to stay competitive. One way to increase this is to apply proper manufacturing strategy and use of tools to achieve business objective in order to stay competitive and to increase profit. This paper addresses the application of manufacturing tool called manufacturing kaizen. Manufacturing kaizen refers to a method for improving a work process by the eliminating waste within an organization. It achieves the elimination of waste by empowering people with tools and a process to uncover improvement opportunities and make change. It explains waste to be any activity that is not value adding from the perspective of the customer. The aim of this paper is to unpack manufacturing kaizen and to look into its qualitative nature, its application within a working environment and how it influence productivity. It also investigates how this tool can be applied in a process or chemical industry and the benefits it can provide to an organization. The results show that labor productivity can be improved over time after the introduction of manufacturing kaizen. It concludes that with introduction of manufacturing kaizen, transformation at workplace can be established leading to productivity improvement within an organization.