What is Kaizen in construction?

Kaizen is a Japanese word for continuous improvement. The practice is best known from manufacturing, where small gains in how work is done are found, tested and kept, cycle after cycle.

We work to it in design and in construction. It is less a technique than a habit of looking at how the work was done and doing it better next time.

What it looks like day to day

Three things happen as a matter of routine. The time taken to complete tasks is reviewed. Feedback from staff and key consultants is sought regularly, including on projects where nothing has gone wrong. And the process is adjusted every cycle based on what was learned.

None of that is dramatic on its own. The effect comes from doing it on every project, so the lessons from one job are already in the method when the next one starts.

Why process efficiency serves the design

There is a reason the process gets this much attention. By making the process side of design efficient, the creative side has the time to develop truly informed outcomes, considering amenity, connection, interaction and management.

On special-use accommodation those outcomes matter more than usual. How residents share a kitchen, how a support worker moves through a dwelling, where a bedroom looks out onto green space: these are design questions that need time, and an efficient process is what gives them that time.

So Kaizen is never a reason to cut design short. The process is sharpened so the idea can be held, not traded away to meet a date.

Kaizen in the factory

A factory is where continuous improvement is easiest to measure. The same tasks repeat under the same conditions, so the time each one takes and the quality it reaches can be recorded and compared.

That record is part of the quality system described in [factory quality control and tolerances](/blog/factory-quality-control-and-tolerances). A step that is slower than it should be, or a detail that needs correcting more often than it should, shows up in the numbers and gets fixed at the source.

On a project with several dwellings of the same type, the improvement happens within the job as well as between jobs. The tenth module of a type benefits from what was learned on the first, which is part of the value set out in [multi-dwelling projects and the value of repetition](/blog/multi-dwelling-projects-and-the-value-of-repetition).

Kaizen in the design programme

Our design runs in eight stages, each with a defined close, as explained in [the eight design stages explained](/blog/the-eight-design-stages-explained). Reviewing how long each stage takes, and what caused any rework inside it, is how the stages themselves get better.

Feedback from consultants matters here. A structural engineer or services designer who has seen the same detail on several projects is often the first to see a better way to document it, and the habit of asking is what brings that knowledge back in.

What a client gets from it

The method gets a little better on each project than it was on the last, and the same mistake is less likely to appear twice, because the cause of each one is found and removed rather than worked around. The design team also has time to think about the people who will live in the building.

It is a quiet discipline, and that is the point, because continuous improvement shows up in the finished building long before anyone needs to talk about it.

MADEmodular / MADEbetter.

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