Literally, Kaizen is a Japanese depiction that means continual improvement.

Historically, Kaizen was originated in Japan in the 50's and specifically at Toyota as a set of concepts and tools that streamlined production, enhanced quality, shortened delivery, and reduced costs. Within the context of industry, Kaizen is now considered as a world-wide applied methodology for improving operations efficiency in manufacturing and service organizations.

 As Toyota started manufacturing cars in the USA in the mid 80's, the concepts and tools of Kaizen quickly spread through the American automotive and other manufacturing companies. The term "lean" was coined by the Americans to denote the Kaizen school of thought meaning "getting more for less". Since then, lean practicing has become a competitive advantage and many organizations are striving to become lean.

Kaizen embraces a number of concepts and tools that can be applied to transform an organization into a lean organization. The most important concept of Kaizen is the removal of waste from our activities. Waste is perceived as the non-value adding activities that we do every day within our operations that carry expenses but do not add value to our products or services. By reducing, or if possibly, eliminating this waste the remaining value-adding activities result in stream-lined operations with easily flowing material and information, with subsequent shorter lead times, better quality and lower costs.