Kaizen Events: Assessing the Existing Literature and Convergence of Practices

Abstract: With the increasing popularity of Kaizen events as a process improvement initiative, the amount of Kaizen event literature has also increased. This article includes a systematic literature review of the Kaizen event body of knowledge, assessing the quality of the literature and synthesizing the literature to find convergent, variant, and divergent practices. The findings indicate that the literature is dominated by trade press and industry case works, with a growing number of academic publications. Several identified themes from the data synthesis were convergent, e.g., the importance of team member authority/autonomy and having a well-defined problem scope, while others were divergent, e.g., the level of functional and hierarchical heterogeneity and Kaizen event deployment. In order to advance the Kaizen event body of knowledge, future research should include more systematic academic investigations and theory-testing works, particularly of these divergent findings.