Chapter 3: Kaizen for Higher Education

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are in an increasingly competitive market to attract and retain students. They are faced with increased pressure to lower costs while increasing student success and retention. They face increased competition for funding and increased demands for reporting and meeting legislative requirements (Hess & Benjamin, 2015; Wiegel & Brouwer-Hadzialic, 2015). Faced with these issues, the need to improve becomes urgent to maintain sustainable HEI operations. Higher education can turn to other industries for inspiration and direction to improve its financial position through operational improvement (Rice & Taylor, 2003). Lean is a management strategy for operations excellence and continuous improvement by focussing on improving value to the customer by reducing waste and variation, and is broadly accepted in other industries (Sunder, 2016). Lean as a discipline has a wide range of techniques and tools to improve. In this chapter, a case study on improving higher education administration operations is presented by utilising the Lean technique, Kaizen. Specifically, the objective of this case study is to demonstrate the Kaizen technique to improve the administrative operations of the employment of graduate students as teaching assistants to faculty for classroom delivery. This case study is limited in scope to a research-intensive university, according to the basic Carnegie classification (Carnegie, 2024).