Frontline employees often contribute the best ideas for process improvement, as Toyota and other companies have often found. In this article, the authors show how the kaizen approach to process improvement used at manufacturing companies can be translated to the context of knowledge work, where it can help companies identify opportunities for automating knowledge work. It revolves around the creation of an ideas platform and development toolkit that employees can share and experiment with. Accounting giant PwC has found that adopting this approach and providing extra recognition and rewards for participation on the platform has helped employees to realize over 7 million hours savings in work time.
Companies around the world benefit from the ideas and innovations of their frontline employees to improve their products and processes. The kaizen approach to this, which originated from the Toyota Production System, has been instrumental in driving performance through frontline employee idea generation and implementation. The basic notion behind kaizen is that a continuous stream of hands-on improvements translates into substantial productivity and quality gains over time.
