Strategic Kaizen Manager

March-June 2024, Bucharest, Romania

Application deadline: January 15, 2024.

Exegens® | Home of the Strategic KAIZEN

Purpose and benefits of the program

If your customer value creation streams must simultaneously ensure quality deliveries on time and an acceptable level of profit, then the Strategic Kaizen Transformation (SKT) methodology helps you reduce non-value-added costs – KAIZENshiro Costing or scientific establishment and continuous achievement of the non-productivity and non-quality cost improvement target – which affects your competitiveness.

When you go from a 40% KAIZENshiro Costing to a 10% one, with a cost reduction of 6% per year for 5 consecutive years by implementing Strategic Kaizen projects that continuously meet the expected level of Takt Profit and default of Return on Investment (ROI), you can increase your profitability and capacity without capital investment. And this is just one of the benefits of successfully implementing Strategic Kaizen Transformation (SKT), other gains include:

Tangible benefits such as…

• Improving productivity by over 45%;
• Equipment efficiency increased from 50-70% to 80-90%;
• Unplanned downtime (breakdown and minor stops, etc.) reduced by approximately 80%;
• Reduction of quality defects by up to 50%;
• Reduction of scrap by approximately 65%;
• Reducing the consumption of materials and utilities by over 30%;
• Reduction of total lead time by over 35%;

Intangible benefits such as…

• Increasing the cohesion of the management team and their strategic and operational decision-making skills;
• Motivated, dedicated and effective improvement teams oriented towards strategic and daily objectives;
• Improving teamwork at all levels;
• Increasing job satisfaction by increasing the cooperation of all employees;
• Proactive and preventive thinking and action, oriented towards strategic and operational solutions and objectives;
• Continuous improvement of knowledge and skills of all employees;
• Safe and stable operating environment.

Program description

Equipment and people productivity, product quality and on-time profitable deliveries are too important to your business success not to make an effort for an SKT program and to have an effective SKT Manager to carry out the strategic and operational guidance of improvements to continuously hit TAKT PROFIT target.

This interactive program is designed for both corporate and factory personnel seeking to learn, initiate and lead a process of strategic and operational improvement to move towards the ideal state of operations, the synchronous and profitable operations achieved only through SKT. Combining classroom learning with hands-on simulations, case study examples, group exercises, focused discussion sessions, and company applications made by participants, participants will delve deep into the methods, concepts, techniques, and tools SKT and will share lessons from their implementation experiences.

Participants learn about the KAIZENshiro culture and daily managerial behaviors that will support SKT by ensuring the alignment of Strategic Kaizen projects with company strategies and objectives;

Over the course of four non-consecutive weeks, participants attend a series of learning modules focused on the four areas critical to success: planning, development, implementation and sustainment.

Between session weeks, participants implement the Strategic Kaizen methodology and Strategic Kaizen projects step by step in their own companies and present the results at the next meeting.

Why is this program unique?

This program for managers shows how SKT links cost improvement strategy to operations through Takt Profit. This program goes beyond simple traditional kaizen improvement that focuses on improving individual processes and functions. By implementing the 7 processes of the Strategic Kaizen methodology, companies can continuously achieve their business goals by achieving the ideal state of operations, the state of synchronous and profitable operations.

With a minimum KAIZENshiro Cost and a maximum TAKT PROFIT, SKT’s results are visible both operationally and especially financially – in KAIZENshiro Budget.

Implement the unique Exegens approach in this program to take your business to the next level.

Program structure

To support an SKT initiative, the program is divided into four 1-week sessions for: planning, development, implementation and support.
These week-long sessions run for approximately 4 months.

During the three intervening weeks between each session week with Dr. Alin Posteucă, participants apply the learning at work and present the results at the next session.

SKT – Week 1 (4,5,6,7 March 2024)

During the first week of SKT, the essential concepts, principles and steps of launching an SKT program are instilled in participants. Learn the seven core processes of SKT, how SKT contributes to strategies and synchronous profitable operations, how to create a master plan for SKT, and how to measure and evaluate the current state of total non-productivity and its costs.

SKT – Week 2 (April 1, 2, 3, 4, 2024)

The success of your initiative in applying SKT depends on the skill of the leadership of the change process at all levels. Week 2 of SKT begins with the best ways to build an SKT initiative and a KAIZENshiro culture that will become ingrained in the organizational culture. The week continues with more in-depth theoretical and practical elements regarding SKT’s own methods and tools.

SKT – Week 3 (13,14, 15 16 May 2024)

SKT development, implementation and management are covered during the third week of SKT-MC. The objectives are to move from the traditional reactive Kaizen approach to the proactive and preventive preparation and implementation of Strategic Kaizen projects to meet the annual target of Takt Profit and KAIZENshiro budget and to track the individual and total results of Strategic Kaizen projects.

SKT – Week 4 (June 10, 11, 12, 2024)

The last week of SKT-MC looks at the critical role of the SKT manager in the change process, presents how to sustain the KAIZENshiro culture, the key points of SKT success, how to design and sustain SKT in your company, how to approach White-Collar Strategic Kaizen , the roles of managers, sponsors and Coaching Skills in SKT, presents an SKT audit system and extends SKT’s strategic systematic improvement approach to product, process and material innovation (cost reduction examples). Final summaries of participants’ individual projects are presented, bringing learning back to the practical reality of workplaces.

What will you gain through this program?

SKTC graduates will gain general knowledge of the 7 core processes of SKT and be able to:

1) establish and customize a strategy for implementing the SKT methodology
2) appropriately use total non-productivity cost data to identify and execute a tactical action plan to meet the annual Takt Profit target
3) justify and implement a complete process of planning and scheduling feasible Strategic Kaizen projects
4) lead Strategic Kaizen events
5) design and carry out SKT audit processes specific to own processes in the company
6) establish a process for collecting basic data on losses and waste
7) carry out analyzes for a deep understanding of the causal connections between losses and waste in dynamics and their related costs
8) organize, calculate and control KAIZENshiro costing and KAIZENshiro budget
9) use the Strategic Kaizen methodology to continuously synchronize it to the strategic objectives
10) continuously make the connection between the KAIZENshiro budgeting cycle and the operational cost improvement strategy by meeting the Takt Profit target to simultaneously forecast and achieve financial and operational expectations

To enter, all participants must have a managerial sponsor who will attest to the results achieved in SKT assignments at work. Participants must be affiliated with a manufacturing or service company that is actively pursuing process improvement techniques and should have a fundamental understanding of improvement techniques.

Participants who successfully complete the four-week training and mentoring program, pass the certification exam and demonstrate successful implementation in their own company are certified by Exegens.

Who will support the program:

The Strategic Kaizen Manager Certification Program will be supported by Dr. Alin Posteucă, the author of the Strategic KAIZEN concept and also the author of the Manufacturing Cost Policy Deployment (MCPD), Speed-Based Target Profit (SBTP), Synchronous Profitable Operations (SPO), TAKT concepts PROFIT and KAIZENshiro Budgets (KsB). All these concepts were published in his five books by Taylor & Francis, Routledge, CRC Press, Productivity Press – New York (USA), London (UK), Boca Raton (USA). Dr. Alin Posteucă is a laureate of the “Traian Vuia” award of the Romanian Academy for his scientific research in the field of operational excellence.