101 Kaizen Templates: Kaizen Idea Suggestion Form

Long-term success in becoming a Lean or Agile organization depends on making many small changes. The kaizen philosophy and its many thinking tools helps with this. The suggestion system, when combined with coaching of ideas, is also a key enabler.

Kaizen Idea Suggestion Example

This particular kaizen was a result of a dialog with a reluctant machine operator. What would it take for him to support one-piece flow efforts of his downstream customer? He felt working in a batch, the traditional way, was convenient. This created problems downstream, for final assembly.

The reasons why he wouldn’t support small lot production was the long time it took to change from one product to another. This was one of the root causes of troubles downstream in assembly. We asked for the operator’s ideas. It was a simple effort to equip that machine with the changeover tools and tooling he needed. The operator got  a dedicated cart. No more scrounging and swiping the tools needed to do his job.

Using a Kaizen Suggestion Template

Once we made the change, the operator was happy, and the final assembly team confirmed this solved their problem, we documented it on a kaizen idea suggestion form.  It is a simple one-page template. You can use it as part of a formal suggestion program. It’s also useful in documenting and recording specific small changes during your continuous improvement efforts. We can use photo or sketches to illustrate the improvement.

There are more sophisticated templates for collecting or summarizing kaizen ideas. Unlike other problem-solving templates, this kaizen suggestion template doesn’t guide you through the steps of root cause analysis. It is meant to be a visual, commonsense, low-barrier way of getting started in making small, practical improvements.

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