To date, Japan’s key success secret for its internationally known quality and excellence is not well shared or acknowledged in some parts of the world. The level of understanding and realization of this Japanese recipe for quality is diverse among the least developed, developing, and developed countries. Developed nations efficiently capitalized on the Japanese management philosophy and benefited greatly, as reported in several studies in the literature. On the contrary, only a handful of studies can be found on the adoption of Kaizen philosophy in developing countries. The existing literature emphasizes the need to carry on more research to discover where the developing nations stand in terms of the Japanese management philosophy and its effectiveness on productivity. Challenges associated with facing acceptance and the transferability of Kaizen as Japanese management philosophy have been the focus of discussion in the recent studies. Therefore, this research aimed to identify factors affecting the Kaizen transferability in non-Japanese cultures by answering the question of; what are the significant factors (internal and external) affecting the transferability and adoption of Kaizen as the Japanese management philosophy in a non-Japanese culture? Based on literature review findings and practices, we included six main factors: employee participation and personal initiative, the discipline of employees, the eagerness of employees, top management commitment, organization structure, and organization culture.

@inproceedings{oscm-2019-490,
  title={Factors of Kaizen Transferability in Non-Japanese Cultures},
  year={2019},
  author={Silvia Sagita Arumsari and Yusril Maulana Rachim and Ammar Mohamed Aamer},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Operations and Supply Chain Management, Vietnam, 2019},
  doi={10.31387/oscm410049}
}

Silvia Sagita Arumsari, Yusril Maulana Rachim, Ammar Mohamed Aamer (2019). Factors of Kaizen Transferability in Non-Japanese Cultures. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Operations and Supply Chain Management, Vietnam, 2019. https://doi.org/10.31387/oscm410049