KAIZEN

Kaizen: Manufacturers Aerospace Components

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Kaizen: Manufacturers Aerospace Components

Introduction

Background

Kaizen is one of the initiatives that several major big businesses have adopted to remain competitive in an international market. This approach focuses on continuous improvement by eliminating a root cause of the problem, as a never-ending process. Kaizen is a concept emerges in Japan, while it is adopted across the globe. Kaizen implementation focuses on four pillars namely, plan, do, check and act, through merging quality circles, improved morale, personal discipline, teamwork, and suggestions for improvement.

The USA aerospace component manufacturers have gained momentous pace because of growing domestic demands and the components' outsourcing. According to the Aerospace Component Manufacturers Association of US, in the year 2011, the domestic industry of US aero component captions for enormous growth of 18 percent in comparison to the export market that is $3.8 billion. A recent study on aerospace component manufacturers is projected to be 5 million units by the year 2015 and more than 9 million in 2020. This industry has potential to contribute around 2.6 percent of GDP by 2020. To compete with global counterparts and gain market share, aerospace industry employed Kaizen to improve efficiency by eliminating wasteful work.

Objectives & Aims

The objective of this paper is:

To demonstrate how kaizen when used appropriately, can help improve product quality, productivity and eliminate waste.

To determine how Kaizen philosophy addresses continuous improvement in management, as well as in the workforce.

Literature Review

Over recent years, extensive literature has been documented the implementation of Kaizen into manufacturing industries. Improving productivity and quality to have a competitive edge over other players in the market is always a prevailing issue in this sector. Therefore, component manufacturers must strive to employ advance technology to operate effectively. There are a number of quality improvement approaches, while Kaizen is being adopted by manufacturing industries and emerged as a successful approach to improve quality. Kaizen is a Japanese term that refers to continuous improvement and appears to be a vital factor economic success. Kaizen can turn an unprofitable company into profitable company by using traditional techniques including management circles and quality circles without huge amount of investment.

The successful implementation of Kaizen reported to have a significant impact in a number of businesses, including electronics, computer, process industry, automotive and aerospace manufacturing company. They all used similar methodology and adapted Kaizen; however, the results achieved and improvement point is different. Considering on hand literature, Kaizen in the aerospace components manufacturers helps in providing directions for continuous improvement.

The aerospace industries are typified by number of customers and parts, a base stock policy for each part at each warehouse, many service centres, tight response times, and low part failure rates. In order to control the quality of product and service, manufacturers have a preference to maintain their average time of response to each client below a level of threshold, which is about 24 hours.

The study of Adams et al. (1999: 766-773) describes Kaizen as a vital tool ...