Kaizen — Toyota-Style 15-Hour Basic Skills Course (Five Sessions)

These files are a derivative of the Kaizen Skills course taught inside Toyota Motor Corporation for many decades. The original supervisor skills course in the 1950s was based on the TWI Job Methods training course. In the 1960s and 70s it was replaced by the P-course taught by Shigeo Shingo, and eventually Toyota’s Training & Education Department created this course and taught it internally to manufacturing supervisors and engineers as part of planned development. Isao Kato, the former head of skills development training at Toyota, helped assemble this similar version for use outside the company.

The course runs 15 hours as five three-hour sessions and is designed for team leaders and other leadership positions in manufacturing. As the introduction stresses, this is not a “5-day kaizen event” of the kind marketed by consultants. Those workshop-style events were scarce inside Toyota (known as jisshuken and used for intensive study). Toyota relied on managers, supervisors, and engineers to drive continuous improvement in the work teams, and this course transfers the underlying skills: time study, motion study, standardized work, and a basic six-step process for thinking about kaizen.

The five sessions:

• Session 1 covers the need for kaizen, basic concepts of work kaizen, and the six-step kaizen process, with its parallels to problem solving.
• Session 2 covers Step 2, current state analysis: motion analysis, work element analysis, time study, and standardized work.
• Session 3 is workplace observation practice on the plant floor, grasping the current situation and noticing kaizen points.
• Session 4 covers Step 3, generating original ideas, and Step 4, creating a kaizen plan.
• Session 5 covers Steps 5 and 6, finalizing and presenting the material, and updating work standards and standardized work.

No participant handout exists for this course, and the original transparencies are not available; the instructor’s guides are the complete set.