Extending the A3: A Study of Kaizen and Problem Solving

Professor of Industrial and Packaging Technology at Cal Poly in San luis obispo, California. Dr. olsen teaches undergraduate and master's courses in lean thinking, six sigma, and operations management. Dr. olsen had over 20 years of industry experience in engineering and manufacturing management before getting his PhD at The ohio State university. His dissertation compared the financial performance of lean versus non-lean companies. Dr. olsen continues his professional development with a focus on creating new knowledge in operations management, biasing his research towards working with real companies and organizations. Darren Kraker has a bachelors of Art in mathematics and a bachelor of Science in Physics from Humboldt State university. He is the supervisor of the Application, Development and Integration team in Information Services at California Polytechnic State university. As supervisor of that team he oversees all in house development of several Java based applications including an automated workflow application based on the enhydra Shark workflow engine. received her bA in Global economics from the university of California Santa Cruz and her mbA from Cal Poly San luis obispo. She is a marketing manager at Shopatron, Inc., an order management software company located in San luis obispo, CA. As an active member of the marketing community, she puts " lean " theory into practice with the continuous improvement of her marketing campaigns. ABSTRACT A case study of a continuous improvement, or kaizen, event is used to demonstrate how allowing " extended " responses to the respective sections of lean A3 problem solving format can enhance student, teacher, and researcher understanding of problem solving. Extended responses provide background and reasoning that are not readily provided by the frugal statements and graphics typically provided in A3s. This approach is an alternative to the iterative one-on-one mentoring most often recommended for learning A3 methodology and improves the efficiency in teaching. The case problem referenced involves a lecturer hiring process at a large state university.