Service Overview

Presidents’ Kaizen, also known as Baseline, is a fact-based problem solving process for setting priorities and taking action by creating ‘common knowledge’ and organizational motivation to overcome inertia and act. This management diagnostic approach analyzes the entire business and can powerfully motivate and aligning people to make change by:

making waste visible and quantify the waste
determining the root causes of waste
identifying high impact activities to attack the causes
generating common understanding based upon facts
establishing one plan based upon consensus to attack and eliminate wastes
quantify the costs and benefits, both financial and intangible

Imagine you get something like this in your mailbox.

“Hello colleagues,
In recent months we have seen a downturn in our business and increased pressure on price and margins. The leadership team and I have decided that it is time to take a step back and do a complete assessment of our business so that we can prioritize the right improvement initiatives going forward. Because of your proven leadership you have been chosen to participate in this process.
We will need to Baseline or entire business. You will be learning a lot more about the Baseline Kaizen process over the next few weeks. We’ll let you know more on project timing at an initial Kickoff and Training webinar next Monday. While we are all very busy it is important that you give this initiative your top priority. You will be asked to help with data collection and will be invited to attend my kaizen to be held in four weeks.
Thank you for your participation in this very critical initiative. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me directly.
Bob, President and CEO”

The Baseline Kaizen process is to Study and Do:

Subteams gather data, analyze business dimensions, identify wastes & variation
“Hook it all together” by displaying the analysis “on the wall”
Develop a system view of the enterprise
Prioritize opportunities and actions
Develop improvement plan
Gain ‘buy-in’ and alignment

Baseline Kaizen process scope is the entire enterprise and Value Stream. Some know this approach as Hoshin Kanri, True North, Policy Deployment, Goal Deployment, Presidents’ Kaizen. Whatever you call it the typical scope includes both material and information flows, organization and culture, management systems, customers and suppliers and can be categorized in these segments:

Customer & Market
Physical Value
Knowledge Flow
Management Systems
Organization & Culture
Financial

Baseline Kaizen Principles are:

Turn data into understanding, understanding into a plan, plan into action
Make processes and wastes visible for all to see
Use data and facts to identify and quantify waste
Leverage common Root Causes
Develop One Plan

Unlike Strategic Planning or traditional goal setting, Baseline involves more people and more levels in an organization. When enough people get uncomfortable enough they may be motivated enough to do somethings differently.