Continuous improvement and Kaizen Costing

In the Japanese language Kaizen Costing is called ‘Genkakaizen’ with ‘genka’ meaning ‘cost’, ‘kai’ meaning ‘change’ and ‘zen’ meaning ‘good’. In other words Kaizen means change to good ways and good results: in the West this is usually interpreted as continuous improvement. For example, Imai (1986) in his glossary of terms defines Kaizen in relation to the workplace as meaning ‘continuous improvement involving everyone – managers and workers alike’. Imai (1986) argues that a Kaizen strategy involves relatively small improvements. Monden and Hamada (1991, p. 17) suggest that ‘Kaizen Costing is the system to support the cost reduction process in the manufacturing phase of the existing product … Kaizen refers to continuous accumulations of small betterment activities rather than innovative improvement’. They also argue that target costing and Kaizen Costing can be linked together and ‘constitute the total cost management system of Japanese companies’ (ibid., p. 17). There is a separate chapter on target costing in this book. See Chapter 6.