Its discussion of that effort is partly a swipe at bigger
Kaizen has earned Japanese automakers good marks for reliability and quality and Toyota practically defined it as its "way," emphasizing daily effort by everyone from the lowest assembly worker to the chief executive. But Nissan Motor Co. says it is implementing novel manufacturing methods and has dozens of ideas in its development pipeline.
"The old-style kaizen gives you a 5 percent, maybe a 10 percent, improvement. But our team's goal is what we call 'kakushin,' to deliver change that's a multiple of the previous," said Atsuhiko Hayakawa, a corporate vice president who heads powertrain production at Nissan.
In an example at Nissan's Yokohama plant, shown to The Associated Press, a coating technology made the metal liner of a cylinder block of an engine about the tenth of its previous thickness, from 2 millimeters (0.08 inches) to 0.2 millimeters (0.01 inches).
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-09-nissan-decries-incremental.html#jCp
