2017 A YEAR IN MOTION

A few years ago, Stäubli Electrical Connectors wanted to create a way for its employees to be empowered to change the company for the better. For that reason, we've assembled a Kaizen or continuous improvement team to help facilitate this mission. Kaizen traces its origin from the Japanese and it simply means "to change for better." This can refer to any improvement, a one-time, or continuous.

Kaizen at Stäubli started originally with a red display board that was attached to the break room wall. The idea for the original board was to display the Kaizen idea submissions from our employees. This showed the organization what was happening in the context of continuous improvement.

In late 2016 it was decided to form a new Kaizen team in order to freshen things up. When the new team formed, we looked at ways to improve the overall processes and focused on three areas.

1. The Kaizen Committee (the people)
2. The Kaizen Form (the process)
3. The Kaizen Board (the storytelling)

The 2017 Kaizen Committee

The original Kaizen team (committee) was made up of department heads only. Patty along with Harry joined the original team as well. For 2017, it was decided to change things up a bit and let non-managers into the team in order to bring new insights and new voices.

New Goals

Once the new committee was formed we focused on the key goal of improving the overall Kaizen experience. We wanted to measure this by having:

• more Kaizen submissions
• more completed Kaizen submissions
• more employee engagement
• more transparency
• more fun

This required the team to become more agile, in order to fulfill the needs of the changing office environment. Thus we assigned roles and responsibilities within our team:

• Patty was the first point of contact, receiving the Kaizen requests and managing the submissions in our company folder
• Harry was the driver during our meetings to go over the newly submitted requests and update the status of these
• Julie made sure to update our new Kaizen Board with new idea submissions
• Ryan was our outside sales liaison to manage our out-of-office staff
• Cathy became our in-house liaison in charge of follow-ups on pending Kaizen requests
• Carlos was the creative involved in the vision and creation of the new submission form, new Kaizen board, as well as certificate awards.

The Meeting

The committee meets every other week to discuss new Kaizen submissions, manage the existing ones, and review actions for pending and completed tasks. All of these interactions can be found in an Excel document available to the company.

Kaizen @ Stand Up

To change things around, we've decided to incorporate a new ritual into our biweekly stand ups. This gives the Kaizen Team an opportunity to talk about new and completed Kaizen idea submissions.

We had another idea of including some sort of award system to encourage more participation. For that reason, every time we have gathered enough completed Kaizen ideas, we use stand up as an award ceremony using Kaizen certificates. This is a wonderful way to recognize our employees for their hard work!

Kaizen Success Stories

Upon completion of your Kaizen idea, we sit down with you for a short interview to write a success story. This gives you a chance to reflect on what you did and offer your own insights into how and why you did it. The success stories follow the same standard format of the original Kaizen idea submission form. It includes your problem statement, your suggested solution, and your intended outcome. We can even add a picture of you, if you like.

In the success story, we also indicate the waste(s) you've eliminated. In lean production, wastes can include: Waste of motion, talent, time, transportation and many more. We are planning a company-wide training on wastes soon. Stay tuned!