QPI and Kaizen Project
The Quality and Productivity Improvement (QPI) / Kaizen project in South Africa started out of a partnership and consolidated through the Record of Discussion between The Department of Trade Industry and Competition and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).
It aims to create a mechanism that will continuously spread QPI activities firstly in the 3 target provinces; namely Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape.
The core value of Kaizen is placed in creating the attitude shared among all members of an organization who consistently pursue advanced levels of quality and productivity, and not just applying its management method.
Kaizen is based on the belief that everything can be improved. It also rests on a respect-for-people principle. Kaizen involves identifying issues and opportunities, creating solutions, and rolling them out and then cycling through the process again for inadequately addressed issues and
problems.
A cycle made up of six steps can be implemented for continuous improvement and can provide a systematic method for executing this process.
Each consultant was assigned to work at an dsignated company to apply what s/he learnt in the classroom training.
The involved consultants fully applied themselves and worked efficiently to improve competitiveness of the attended companies.
We proudly present that the average improvement ratio of KPI was calculated as 62.6% among the 19 companies attended.