Kaizen in quality improvement at SPBV factory

Abstract

The ultimate objective of manufacturing industries is to increase productivity with high quality. At present, many manufacturing companies are facing problems such as high defect rate, high inventories, high lead time, high costs of production, and inability to cope with customer orders. Kaizen is one of the powerful tools of lean manufacturing. Kaizen refers to continuous improvement in performance, cost, and quality. The main objective of this paper is to provide a background on kaizen, steps for kaizen implementation, and then a case study of Kaizen implementation has been discussed. This case study is to present an application of Kaizen to reduce cap defects at SPVB factory. The 10-step Kaizen method of SBF Group has been applied for an improvement project. Based on the company’s strategy, the project has identified the main problem of Oolong Tea + cap defects and found out the factors of the machine that were the root causes of this problem. Two groups of solutions have been proposed and implemented to overcome these causes: Restoration solution and Kaizen solution. As a result of the improvement project, the Oolong Tea + cap defect rate has decreased from 0.14% to 0.03%. Then the project has recommended the activities that need to standardize and identified future challenges for improvement.