A3 paper proposal

An A3 paper proposal is so powerful tool that all participants can easily understand and get what you’re going to explain to them in a meeting.

Since I’m a consultant for KAIZEN or continuous improvement in the manufacturing arena, I usually use the only one (1) A3 paper of which all contents of the KAIZEN includes.

I would like to share the way how to compose the contents and ideas into an A3 paper.

1. Background. Please describe the reason why you would like to proceed with the KAIZEN so that all the participants will be able to know and understand.
2. Basic Idea. Here is the Goal of the improvement. To take any action, there should be an ultimate goal of the project. This is the core idea of the activity to focus on the issue and countermeasure that you are going to explain to them.
3. Items Concern or Arena. You have to define what specific arena or which particular item that you intend to improve. This is sometimes numbers or basic data of which the upcoming KAIZEN taken action.
4. Current Scenarios and Problems. Because of what you’ve been aware of and noticed, you think that you need to take action to improve. You need to specify what happens in the arena as you have mentioned at the above 2.
5. Countermeasure or Proposal. This is what you would like to propose to solve the problem of the above 4. Please describe what you want to do with simple drawings and/or data.
6. Project members or group. To proceed with this project, I believe that you have to make a KAIZEN group to cover the related section or division of the project. You can specify the name of the section or division involved.
7. Basic Schedule. Please define the schedule of the project from the start-up to the end so that all the participants can foresee when the project finishes.
8. Projected Saving and Impact. Of course, people want to know how much we shall spend the project and how much the benefit after the project ends. We can define the cost-benefit.

I guess that it will insufficient space onto this A3 paper to describe the project, what you can do is to attach those evidence and/or data so that people can refer them with more details.

Nowadays, people use an application of Powerpoint to describe the scenarios and issues of what to do, though, it is likely to be congested in stories with data and drawing so that the participants cannot focus on what you intend them to understand and get.

An A3 paper proposal is easy to read and profound in contents upon the meeting so I hope that you can use the A3 paper proposal to convince them of the necessity of KAIZEN or Continuous Improvement in your industry or work arena.