The KAIZEN and the Producivity

looking back over the period following the Second World War, we have seen Japan attain the status of a world economic power, going through five phases of adaptation to become a formidable competitor in various product areas. These phases are: Large-scale absorption of technology imported from the United States and Europe A productivity drive of hitherto unseen dimensions A country-wide quality improvement programme A great degree of manufacturing flexibility Multinationality After successfully assimilating foreign technology and then achieving very high productivity and top quality, Japanese industries are now focusing on flexible manufacturing technologies. This means having the capability to adapt manufacturing in very short time to changing customer and market requirements. The key words are mechanisation, automation, robotisation and related systems. The world is going through a period of transition from fragmented markets to a more or less global one. Doing business in such an environment calls for unique characteristics of multinationality. To survive in highly competitive world, it is imperative for multinationals to acquire the finesse which will enable them to be identified with and integrate into the business environment or country in which business is being done. However, successful Japanese companies have been up until now, the real challenge they continue to face lies in becoming truly multinational. After this short historical introduction we can realise that together with the other some thousands of the studies in this topic, it is easy to discuss on Japanese management systems generally but that moment when we would try to find some indicators to evaluate the productivity of this KAIZEN based management systems or to compare them with the so called ‘Western’ system we must face the difficulties of the same. These problems originated from the differences between the cultural orientation and social value systems. The traditional appraisal system of the well-known financial indicators is not used at a great extent in our days on the field of corporate planning and evaluation but the majority of the significant firms try to introduce some kind of ‘balanced score card’ or ‘performance prism’ evaluation system. As we try to apply these up-to-date methods to a KAIZEN system the task will even be more difficult. Of course, our small researchig group – and in it’s framework this study – should not undertake to try to evalute the so called ‘original KAIZEN systems’ owned, managed and developed in the ‘authentic Japanese environment’ but what we would try to do is to draw the attention of Hungarian small and medium size enterprises the advantages of applying KAIZEN elements in their work.