Focued improvement in an industrial environment

In the industrial field the concept of World Class Manufacturing has already been studied, analyzed and applied for many years. It is a process driven approach which sets standards for production and manufacturing with the aim of an operational excellence based program. The system is centered around ten management and ten technical pillars. In this work, the “Focused Improvement”, one of the technical pillars, is examined in depth and practically applied in an industrial context. Speaking about Focused Improvement it’s impossible not to mention the concept of Continuous Improvement (Kaizen). It is a kind of thinking exploited in management but also in everyday life in Japan and it has been identified since a long time as one of the key factors for the Toyota company success. Recently it has been revised by many literature articles from a perspective of innovation with the aim of deepen its understanding, widen its horizons of application and answer main questions about its employment in the current manufacturing. This work performs a review of the most recent Kaizen literature, highlighting its principles, the main types and the correlated tools and techniques to achieve one, several or all the planned objectives. Moreover, a practical case study faced during my internship in FPT Industrial is presented. It is analyzed following the scientific procedure explained in one of the most quoted articles in the field, written by the Japanese associate professor Shumpei Iwao and entitled “Revisiting the existing notion of continuous improvement (Kaizen): literature review and field research of Toyota from a perspective of innovation”. The activity comes out with remarkable results in terms of costs and time, limiting the quantity of finished parts the company is obliged to buy from external suppliers due to lack of resources.