About KAIZEN
Built by practitioners, not career consultants.
KAIZEN was founded in 2008 by Takeshi Yamamoto, a 14-year veteran of Toyota's Operations Management Consulting Division — the internal group that deployed TPS to Toyota's global supplier base. The firm has grown as a practitioner-led partnership, not a consulting factory.
Our Story
From the Toyota OMCD to your shop floor
The Toyota Production System is the most studied manufacturing system in history. It has also been the most misapplied. Thousands of manufacturers have purchased the tools — the value-stream maps, the 5S kits, the kanban cards — and seen the gains evaporate within six months.
Takeshi Yamamoto saw this pattern from the inside. During his years at Toyota's OMCD, he worked with dozens of supplier plants that had been through lean deployments that didn't stick. The diagnosis was almost always the same: the tools had been applied without the system. And the system required a daily management infrastructure that no one had built.
KAIZEN was founded to do lean differently — with a practitioner-led team that had actually run production systems, not just studied them. Every principal at KAIZEN has held operational accountability in a manufacturing environment. None of us came from a traditional consulting background.
The firm has remained deliberately small. We take engagements we can staff with principals, not associate consultants. We return to client sites to measure 12-month post-engagement performance. And we turn down engagements where the leadership commitment is insufficient to sustain the gains.
The Toyota Way Applied
Four operating principles we live by
Continuous Improvement
改善We apply kaizen to our own methods as rigorously as we apply it to our clients' operations. Every engagement teaches us something. We track our own results, reflect on what worked, and improve the model. The gap between current state and ideal state is not a failure — it is the work.
Respect for People
人への敬意The two pillars of the Toyota Way are continuous improvement and respect for people. The second pillar is the harder one. Respect means engaging the people on the floor as the experts they are, not as obstacles to change. Every standard we write, we write with the operator — not for them.
Go to the Gemba
現場主義The answer is never in the conference room. It is on the floor, in the process, observable in real time. We are deeply suspicious of conclusions drawn from reports, dashboards, or second-hand accounts. We verify with our own eyes. We measure with our own stopwatches.
Honest Diagnosis
誠実な診断We tell clients what we see, not what they want to hear. If the problem is leadership behavior, we say so. If the problem is a system they built, we say so. Flattery is waste. An honest assessment of the current state is the only valid starting point for improvement.
The Team
Practitioners who have run the systems they improve
Every KAIZEN principal has held direct operational accountability. We have run production lines, owned OEE targets, and been responsible for delivery to customers. That experience shapes every recommendation we make.
Takeshi Yamamoto
Founder & Principal
Takeshi spent 14 years at Toyota Motor Corporation in Nagoya, working within the Operations Management Consulting Division — the internal group that deployed TPS to Toyota's global supplier base. After leading transformations at dozens of suppliers across Japan, North America, and the UK, he founded KAIZEN in 2008 with a conviction that the depth of TPS could be made accessible to manufacturers without Toyota's resources. He has since led engagements in 11 countries across 6 industry sectors.
Credentials
- Lean Master (Toyota OMCD)
- Certified Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt
- B.S. Industrial Engineering, Nagoya University
Specialty: Toyota Production System, Value-Stream Transformation
Sarah Chen
Director, Lean Transformation
Sarah brings 18 years of hands-on operations experience in automotive and aerospace manufacturing. Before joining KAIZEN, she served as VP of Operations at a Tier-1 suspension components manufacturer, where she led a 3-year lean deployment that reduced lead time by 60% and delivered $14M in cost reduction. She is particularly skilled at building the people systems — daily management, standard work for leaders, and tiered accountability — that make lean stick after the consultants leave.
Credentials
- Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt (ASQ)
- Shingo Institute Silver Medallion
- MBA, University of Michigan Ross School of Business
Specialty: Daily Management Systems, Leadership Standard Work, Lean Culture
Marcus Reynolds
OEE & Equipment Effectiveness Lead
Marcus spent a decade in the oil & gas and chemical process industries before moving into discrete manufacturing. That background — where equipment reliability is a matter of plant safety, not just production efficiency — gives him a uniquely rigorous approach to TPM. He has deployed predictive and autonomous maintenance programs in environments ranging from food-grade sanitary processing to titanium machining. He has yet to find a plant where a properly structured OEE program didn't reveal at least 15 hidden percentage points.
Credentials
- Certified Reliability Engineer (ASNT)
- Lean Six Sigma Black Belt
- B.S. Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Tech
Specialty: TPM, OEE, SMED, Reliability Engineering
Priya Patel
Supply Chain & Flow Specialist
Priya's career bridges supply chain strategy and factory-floor operations — a combination that lets her see constraints that pure supply chain consultants miss. She has designed and implemented pull systems, supermarket replenishment models, and supplier development programs for manufacturers ranging from $40M to $2B in revenue. She is a recognized voice on heijunka and level loading for high-mix environments, and has spoken at AME and APICS national conferences.
Credentials
- CPIM (APICS)
- Lean Six Sigma Black Belt
- M.S. Supply Chain Management, MIT
Specialty: Pull Systems, Heijunka, Supplier Development, Throughput
Why We Stay Small
We turn down more engagements than we take
A lean engagement delivered at arms-length, by an associate who has never run a production line, is worse than no engagement at all. It consumes management attention, produces paper artifacts, and leaves the organization immunized against the real thing.
We staff every engagement with principals. We take the number of engagements we can staff that way — no more. The result is a firm that is harder to schedule but delivers work we are proud to put our names on.
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Ready to see what's hiding in your value stream?
Every engagement begins with an operations assessment — a structured Gemba walk where we observe your current state, quantify your key losses, and map the opportunity. No commitment required. If the numbers make sense, we talk scope.