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Lean Definition: Daily Improvement

Daily improvement is the strategy of making constant, incremental improvements each and every day in order see impressive long term gains.

While many people see kaizen as just a week-long event, it is much more powerful when an entire workforce engages in daily improvement efforts.

Daily improvement does not have to be extreme. Moving a garbage can closer to where it is needed, or labeling a location for a stapler near a copier are both examples of small daily improvements that add up over time.

Of course, there are some prerequisites for daily improvement to work.

Employees must be engaged and have a desire to offer up ideas.

They must believe that the changes they make will not get them in trouble if something goes wrong.

And they must be coached and trained in the art of daily improvement. (See my book, Whaddaya Mean I Gotta Be Lean? for over 100 specific, easy-to-implement strategies to help employees tackle Lean projects on their own.)

Daily improvement gets its power from the relentless assault on waste. If each person in an organization makes just one improvement a week, that comes in at over 50 a year. If it is one a day, a team of just five people can use their daily improvement efforts to make over a 1000 changes a year.

By Jeff Hajek

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Jeff Hajek.

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