Kaizen Events (Kaizen Blitz): Your 2025 Guide to Driving Real Change in 5 Days

If you’re responsible for continuous improvement on the shop floor, you already know: Kaizen isn’t a one-time project, it’s an organizational mindset. Whether you're reducing waste, improving flow, or solving a nagging quality issue, structured Kaizen events can drive real, measurable change.

This 2025 edition is a refreshed, hands-on guide to planning and running Kaizen events (also called Kaizen blitzes). We’ve updated it with real-world templates, day-by-day breakdowns, and practical metrics, so your team knows what to do before, during, and after the event.

We’ll cover when to run a Kaizen, how it fits into the Toyota Production System (TPS), and why standardized work is key to sustaining results.

If you’re looking for a broader view, check out our Ultimate Guide to Kaizen, but if you’re planning your next event, you’re in the right place.

Kaizen events, also known as Kaizen blitzes, are short-duration events, usually in the form of a week-long workshop, in which a facilitator guides a team in improving an area with a specific goal in mind.

Typically during a Kaizen event, the facilitator leads the team (which is generally comprised of people who work in the area in which the event is being conducted) in standardizing and documenting processes and identifying, implementing, and documenting improvements to that area. After the event, improvement opportunities are prioritized based on the needs of the business.

Download our Ultimate Guide to Kaizen & Drive Continuous Improvement in Your Operations →

“Kaizen” is the philosophy of continuous improvement. Translated from Japanese, the word “kaizen” translates to “changing something for the better.” It was originally used by Japanese businesses after World War II, influenced by teachings in American business and quality management, and became adopted by the Toyota Production System (also known as TPS), where employees are famously required to stop the line if an abnormality arises (known as Jidoka) and, along with their supervisors, suggest an improvement.

Kaizen is used as a tool in lean manufacturing with the goal of eliminating waste by continuously improving standardized processes, equipment, and other procedures for carrying out daily production. The main requirement is that existing procedures be standardized and documented so that improvements can be evaluated objectively.

While Kaizen is primarily associated with manufacturing, it is practiced across all functions of a business and has been adopted by other industries such as healthcare, finance, psychotherapy, life-coaching, government, and banking.

Beyond improving workflows, Kaizen is an ongoing process that can facilitate a culture of identifying and correcting inefficiencies and nurture a sense of ownership among workers. It also has the benefit of eliminating wastes in the process by reducing non-value added activities to a minimum.

Daily Kaizen looks different. It’s the steady drumbeat of small, continuous improvements built into how people work every day. A Kaizen event, on the other hand, is structured and time-boxed. It’s what you pull out when progress has slowed or when a process has drifted so far off course that you need a reset.

Both approaches share the same foundation: stop problems at the source, rely on standardized work, and make sure improvements stick. What really matters is that every change, whether it’s a five-minute fix or a week-long effort can be measured, repeated, and tied back to real operational outcomes.

Most Kaizen events follow a simple cycle:

Plan → Execute → Measure → Standardize → Sustain

In practice, that means building a plan, running the event step by step, and making sure the gains hold after everyone goes back to their regular work. Next, we’ll walk through what that looks like day by day and share a planning checklist you can adapt to your own team and process.

While the principles of Kaizen should be practiced by all members of an organization on a continual basis, scheduled Kaizen events may be necessary in order to tackle larger problems. Also, maintaining a culture of solving the root cause of problems before they become bigger is key.

Reasons to hold a Kaizen event include:

• Solving an urgent problem that puts the business at risk and needs to be addressed quickly
• Achieving a strategic goal that will impact KPIs
• Identifying and solving the root cause of issues that prevent daily improvement cycles from achieving results
• Solving cross-functional challenges, such as improving the handoff of work between teams, including upstream and downstream events on a production value stream.
• Sustaining the practice of continuous improvement in your company, especially if you haven’t had a Kaizen event in a while
• Introducing new team members to continuous improvement techniques

A well-run Kaizen event doesn’t just fix a broken process, it resets how your team works together.

Here’s what you can expect:

• Problems get solved fast. No back-and-forth meetings. The right people are in the room, empowered to make changes on the spot.

• Waste becomes obvious. Once the team maps out the process, it’s easy to spot the unnecessary steps and workarounds, and remove them.

• Operators buy in. When frontline ideas get implemented right away, people take ownership. The change sticks because they helped build it.

• Morale gets a boost. Quick wins build confidence. It shows the team that improvement isn’t just talk.

• Metrics improve. Lead times drop. Defects go down. Throughput picks up. You’ll see the difference in the numbers.
  
  

At the end of the day, a Kaizen event is a reset button that pulls people together and gets everyone moving in the same direction again.

Investing time into planning your Kaizen event is critical to the event’s success; in fact, properly planning the event is just as important as the event itself. Set your event up for success by clearly defining the goals and scope of the event and strategically assembling a team that will bring important insights to the table. Here are some key steps to planning your Kaizen event:

Appoint a skilled facilitator

The facilitator should be trained in lean techniques and philosophies and be able to help your team stay on track and motivate them; the facilitator should be someone who is passionate about creating positive change. You may wish to hire a consultant for this role or train a team leader from within your organization. Having a skilled facilitator is key to the success of your Kaizen event.

Make sure leadership is engaged

Make sure your organization understands the importance of the Kaizen event to your business’s bottom line. Gaining buy-in is crucial to the success of your Kaizen initiatives, and if your organization’s leaders are committed to sustaining a culture of continuous improvement, they will set the tone for the rest of the company.

Set the scope and limits of the event

Clearly define the scope of the Kaizen event. The main focus of the event should be an area or process in which it has been determined that inefficiency is reducing value to the customer. The focus can be narrowed by analyzing KPIs, root causes, and other Lean metrics. Keep in mind that the end goal is to promote continuous improvement and reduce waste

Assemble the team

While everyday Kaizen should involve all members of your organization (from employees on the shop floor to upper-level leadership), Kaizen event teams usually consist of 6-10 people and should be strategically chosen. Keep in mind the following when choosing team members:

• At least half of the team should be made up of people who regularly perform the work that the Kaizen event is intended to improve.
• Limit the number of managers/company leaders on the team.
• Choose team members from a wide range of relevant departments, who all touch the process being improved
• Include people who provide input to the area
• Include people who receive output from the area
• Include subject matter experts who have special knowledge about the process. • Include someone who’s not directly involved in the process to provide an outside perspective.

Define success

It’s imperative to be able to objectively measure success from your Kaizen event and other continuous improvement efforts. Identify metrics that quantify improvements. These may include metrics revolving around quality, cost, resource utilization, customer satisfaction, space utilization, staff efficiency, and other KPIs. Set benchmarks for improvement by measuring your current performance.

Provide training

Communicate expectations to the facilitator and team members.

Outline the event schedule

Have a rough schedule mapped out, including what you hope to achieve in the Kaizen event. Identify milestones for each day of the event.

Once the prep is out of the way, the event itself moves quickly. Five days is the usual rhythm long enough to dig in, short enough to keep energy high. Some teams finish in three, others need a bit more, but the flow is pretty consistent.

Day 1: Define, Map, Diagnose
The first day is about getting everyone on the same page. The team sets a concrete goal i.e. something measurable, like cutting setup time by 25%. Then they walk through the process step by step, mapping how work actually happens instead of what the SOP claims. By the end of the day, waste and pain points are usually obvious, and the group has a clear picture of what “success by Friday” should look like.

Day 2: Root Causes and Options
Now the digging starts. Using simple tools like 5 Whys, Cause-and-effect charts (Fishbone), Pareto the team traces problems back to their source. It’s structured but still creative. Once the causes are clear, people start throwing out solutions. Not every idea sticks, but by the end you’ve narrowed it down to a few realistic countermeasures and you know what resources you’ll need to try them.

Day 3: Try It on the Floor
This is where things shift from planning to action. Layout changes, process tweaks, tool adjustments whatever makes sense gets piloted live. It’s not about polishing; it’s about seeing how the ideas hold up in real work. Documentation happens as changes are made so nothing gets lost in the shuffle.

Day 4: Test and Lock In
The new process runs under normal conditions. Data like cycle times, yields, error rates comes in and the team compares it to the baseline. If something’s off, adjustments are made. If it works, it gets locked in as the new standard. The key is making the new way easy to follow and easy to share.

Day 5: Train and Sustain
The last day is about handing it back to the operation. Operators get trained, results are shared, and the people who did the work get recognized. A sustainment plan is put in place audits, KPIs, follow-ups so the gains don’t fade after the workshop. The changes also get communicated to other shifts or teams so the impact spreads.

You just ran a Kaizen event. People are fired up, processes look tighter, and there’s a fresh standard work doc on the wall. But how do you know it worked?

That’s where the numbers come in.

Before the event, start with a solid baseline like cycle time, scrap rate, downtime, whatever’s relevant to your target. Then measure the same metrics again immediately after, and a few weeks later, to see what stuck.

The most common Kaizen metrics include:

• Quality (defects, scrap, first-pass yield)

• Cost (materials, labor, downtime)

• Resource utilization (people, machines, space)

• Customer impact (lead time, satisfaction)

• Operator efficiency (walk time, motion waste)

• Throughput and cycle time

• OEE-adjacent indicators (availability, performance, quality)
  

If you're using Tulip, this part gets a whole lot easier. With our real-time analytics, you can track performance from the floor—before, during, and after the event. Data flows in from machines, devices, and operators automatically. You can visualize improvements in dashboards, control charts, and trend lines without waiting for IT.

And when you want to show the impact to leadership? Just pull up the before-and-after story, backed by data not just anecdotes.

A good Kaizen event ends with improvements. A great one makes sure they stick.

Once the team rolls out changes, the real work begins, locking in standard work, keeping eyes on the process, and catching drift before it becomes a problem again.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Make sure new workflows are documented clearly (ideally in real-time, not after the fact).

• Build audits and leader standard work into the daily routine.

• Track a few key metrics where everyone can see them.

• Set a follow-up cadence i.e. 30, 60, and 90 days to review results and make tweaks if needed.

This is where tools matter. With Tulip, you can embed digital checks, trigger andon events when something goes off-spec, and use apps from the App Library to build a lightweight daily management system that keeps changes visible and enforceable.

Bottom line: You don’t need perfection, just structure. Sustaining Kaizen is about making the right thing the easy thing to do every day.

Even if you’ve run dozens of Kaizen events, small missteps can sneak in and quietly derail the work. The good news is that most are easy to avoid with a little foresight.

Here are the usual suspects and how to sidestep them:

• Scope that's too broad. If you're trying to fix everything, you'll fix nothing. Focus on one process, one problem. Tighter scope = faster wins.

• No baseline data. You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Before the event starts, capture key metrics like cycle times, scrap and downtime so you know where you're starting from.

• Too many leaders, not enough doers. A room full of managers won’t move the needle. Your best team is operator-heavy, with just enough support to clear roadblocks.

• Leaving operators out. If the people who run the process daily aren’t involved, expect pushback or even worse, zero adoption. Operators bring the on-the-ground reality check every Kaizen team needs.

• No real-time data during execution. Don’t wait for the post-mortem to see what changed. Digital tools let you track impact as it happens, not three weeks later in a spreadsheet.

• No plan to sustain gains. This is the big one. Kaizen isn't over on Friday. Document the new way of working, clearly and in real time, and build follow-ups into the daily routine. Think: audits, visual metrics, leader standard work, and 30/60/90-day check-ins.

And don’t forget the tools. Digital apps (like Tulip) make it easy to embed checks, surface real-time metrics, and trigger alerts when things drift out of spec. Sustaining improvement isn’t about perfection, it’s about making the right thing easy to do, every day.

Kaizen shouldn’t end when the event wraps up. But for many teams, that’s exactly what happens: improvements fade, metrics slide, and things quietly drift back to the old way of working.

Tulip helps teams turn those short-term wins into lasting change.

With Tulip, you can digitize your continuous improvement process end-to-end i.e. no binders, no siloed spreadsheets, no waiting on IT. Every improvement becomes part of how work gets done on the floor.

Here’s how it works:

• Replace paper checklists with interactive apps that guide standardized work in real time

• Automatically capture data directly from operators, machines, and sensors

• Trigger andon events the moment something goes off-track

• Roll out updates to standard work instantly across teams or sites

• Visualize progress with live dashboards and spot trends using historical data
  

Because Tulip connects people, systems, and frontline workflows in one no-code platform, teams can go from “let’s fix this” to “this is how we work now” i.e. faster, and with far less friction.

A Kaizen event’s not meant to be complicated. It’s a focused sprint that is for just a few days, a small team, and one problem to solve. When you keep it tight, the wins come quickly.

But here’s the hard part: making those wins stick.

That’s where digital tools help. With a platform like Tulip, you can lock in the new standard, keep it front and center, and make sure the improvements last long after the event wraps.