Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Kaizen and Analytics: The Power of Each Employee to See Data


Do companies really know how to unleash the power of employees to be the leaders in their industry? Toyota has shown a different approach to innovation, kaizen or continuous improvement approach rather than a technology leap approach. Instead of great technological breakthroughs, this approach goes for involving the entire workforce in a continuous improvement process. Hence, most of the improvements are small and process oriented (like making shelves more easily to reach) but the involvement of the entire workforce rather than a selected few keeps a vibrant and innovative enterprise. The best measurement of how this work is that the Toyota workforce gives managements one hundred times more suggestions for improvement than other auto manufacturers.

Businesses that want to improve their analytics capabilities should follow the kaizen approach and make business analytics available throughout the entire organization. It seems that in some companies analytics is only within the purview of the few like statisticians, physicians, molecular engineers, and actuaries. The concept behind this thinking is that analytics technology is expensive and difficult to interpret. This premise is no longer applicable since in the last three years mathematical science and computer technology have advanced to such a degree that this technology is now inexpensive and available to interpretation to anyone within an organization.

This technology is the work of dedicated professionals and scientist that over many years have worked to make this possible. The issue now has become whether companies want to institute a continuous improvement process that includes enterprise analytics or whether they want to leave business analytics in the hands of the few.

If you want to know how to do kaizen analytics in your company let Hewlett-Packard help you. Our Technology Services Group had over $30 billion in revenues last year, or contact me at alberto.roldan@hp.com



1 comment:

lafever said...

Interesting article. The question is do companies understand the power of every employee being able to look at the data? I have never visited Toyota but I have visited Subaru in Indiana and saw their kaizen. I am shocked that more companies don't imitate Toyota.

Dan Lafever
Kaizeneer
http://www.littlebylittlechange.blogspot.com/

Business Analytics

Business Analytics

About Me

My photo
See my resume at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-IonTpDtAgZyp3Pz5GqTJ5NjY0PhvCfJsYAfL1rX8KU/edit?hl=en_USid=1gr_s5GAMafHRjwGbDG_sTWpsl3zybGrvu12il5lRaEw