Bringing Kaizen to the classroom: lessons learned in an Operations Management course

The managerial approach of Kaizen is used by different organisations around the world in order to improve the performance of their work processes and operations. Both the Total Quality Management literature and Kaizen have shown different efforts to illustrate the application of this approach in the traditional classroom-style business education. Also, business schools have a clear need for showing consistency between what is being taught in the classroom and what is being done in the day-to-day operations of the organisation. The purpose of this article is to describe the systematic application of Kaizen and its learned lessons during the last three years in the Operations Management (OM) course from the Master in Business Administration graduate programme taught at the Mexican Business School. An exploratory qualitative study was conducted. This research project provides empirical evidence of how Kaizen's continuous improvement cycle (PDCA) enables better results in students who have taken the subject o...