At Ipsen, 2025 is the year of Kaizen.
Since 2023, Ipsen’s Chief Service Officer John Dykstra and the leadership team have launched several Kaizen kickoff events. The goal: delivering better customer service, improving efficiency, and empowering employees to drive changes that enhance product consistency and quality.
Kaizen, a word that means “change for good” in Japanese, is a process synonymous with continuous improvement that has grown to become a popular corporate approach to systemic innovation.
Dykstra sees the Kaizen approach as a major opportunity for Ipsen to grow.
“To me, Kaizen is the ability to understand that an organization is not perfect, processes are not perfect, and it helps us open our eyes to those imperfections. It lets us communicate across several departments, form action plans, and look for opportunities to make every process work better.”
Dykstra’s background as an Military Police Officer for the U.S. Army, followed by a career of administration and management roles has provided him with a variety of leadership experiences. The system that he found most effective, and the one that has helped him succeed and advance, was Kaizen. His experience with Kaizen and process improvement shaped his approach at Ipsen, where he has helped implement a structured, company-wide strategy to drive efficiency and quality improvements.
Building a Team of Kaizen Champions
One of the most visible changes from these Kaizen events is a significantly improved response time for Ipsen OEM parts orders. By late 2024, Ipsen’s Parts Department saw a 40% increase in sales over three years. Much of this growth is credited to Kaizen-driven improvements that enabled the parts team to respond faster to quote requests and provide more reliable lead times for custom parts orders.
To achieve such success, Dykstra needed to recruit a team of Kaizen champions to lead events, implement recommendations, and track and report outcomes. Among them were Christina Connelly, Ipsen’s Director of ICS Parts, and Evan Hundley, Ipsen’s Retrofits Manager.
“It’s important to get everyone on board, to understand the vision,” Connelly explained. “Kaizen represents the start of having employees not just be on board for changes but want to guide and be a part of the change. It builds relationships across departments that help create a shared vision.”
As Connelly explained, “Kaizen gives us permission to look deeply at a process and identify quick wins that we could start implementing immediately, while setting goals to tackle any of the larger issues that we might encounter.” One of the systems they looked at in the parts department was an upgrade to an order distribution system.
“At the time of our first Kaizen event, the parts team had three employees, which made communication very simple. Once we recognized that we needed to grow our team, however, the systems we had in place to handle incoming orders were simply not robust or scalable enough,” Connelly recalled.
As the department grew to fourteen employees, the request for quote (RFQ) system also became more robust. What was once an Outlook distribution list became a trackable system, now linked with Salesforce CRM, to manage all inbound requests. Fulfillment responsibilities are now clearly assigned to available team members, and the parts team, equipment sales teams, and customers can view and share up-to-date order information.
“This change has made a huge difference in terms of giving us process visibility, better structure, and providing useful notifications to the customer once the order has been fulfilled,” Connelly explained. “It also eased the burden that some of our senior staff members encountered. New hires were able to pick up more work while senior staff members were freed up to deliver in-depth team training and to work on more specialized projects.”
Streamlining Operations for the Future
Hundley, recently promoted from a project management role to Retrofits Manager, worked with Ipsen’s team in Souderton, Pennsylvania to lead a Kaizen event focused on improving hot zone assembly operations.
“It seemed like they were genuinely excited to get asked questions about how their processes could be improved,” Hundley recalled of the experience, “They were really open to giving answers and providing suggestions. That was awesome to see.”
For Hundley, identifying opportunities for improvement can range from eliminating those annoying repetitive tasks, to ensuring that no single team member is the only person with critical information that, if lost, would significantly derail production.
“One premise I like to work from is to ask ‘What if any one person won the lottery and left the next day?’ How would we proceed?” Hundley explained why this line of questioning is so important, “If you don’t know, it’s time to identify those parts and processes where we’re fully relying on tribal knowledge and remove them from the system. We can identify the need for a clearly defined process, not having any issues if the employee gets that winning ticket and flies off to Hawaii.”
Whether a systemic issue is large or small, Hundley advocates investing the time to identify the changes that need to be made.
“Even if it’s removing a 5-minute process that you do, when you do that process enough times every single day, that can be a lot of wasted time. By spending an hour to find a fix for the issue, you’re going to make up that time inside of a couple weeks.”
It’s easy to understand why the Kaizen approach is valuable to Ipsen when you consider the big picture: customer satisfaction directly drives future sales. Investing time to make sure that employees can find faster, better ways to deliver the right parts and best service makes sense – both in the short term and the long term.
“When we’re selling new equipment, it’s important to have the mindset that we plan to support that customer for the lifetime of the furnace. We want to be providing parts and service to that customer for twenty years or more,” Hundley explained.
“And as customers are happier buying more parts and services from us, the more likely they’ll look to us when it’s time to buy new equipment,” Connelly added. “By improving the job that we do on both ends of the sale, we’ll gain opportunities and stay ahead of our competition.”
