The Japanese term for continuous improvement used by Toyota is kaizen.
In Japanese, kaizen literally means “improvement” or “change for the better.” Toyota made the word famous by embedding it in the Toyota Production System, where employees continually look for practical ways to improve quality, safety, efficiency, and workflow.
Kaizen usually emphasizes many small, repeatable improvements rather than one dramatic overhaul. Workers and supervisors may examine a process, identify waste or a source of defects, test a change, and then standardize the result if it works. The approach is closely linked with the PDCA cycle—Plan, Do, Check, Act—and with Toyota’s broader principle of respect for people.
A common mix-up is confusing kaizen with jidoka, kanban, or andon. Jidoka means stopping or designing processes to expose defects, kanban is a visual scheduling or replenishment method, and andon refers to a visual signal used to highlight a problem. They support Toyota’s production philosophy, but kaizen is the improvement principle itself.