Kaikaku
japanese for radical improvement.

Kaizen
Taken from the Japanese words kai and zen where kai means change and zen means good. The popular meaning is continuous improvement of all areas of a company not just quality. (more)

Kanban
A small sign that is the key control for the just-in-time production. It serves as: instruction for production and conveyance; visual control tool to check for over production and to detect irregular processing speeds; tool to perform kaizen.

Kankei-kaisha
affiliated supplier plant

Kano Model
In the late 1970s Dr. Noriaki Kano of Tokyo Rika University further refined the notion of quality derived partially from his study of Herzberg's "Motivator-Hygiene Theory" and re-defined quality along two dimensions in contrast to the linear "good-bad" "ok-not ok" dimension in existence all along. The two dimensions were: 1) the degree to which a product or service performs, & 2) the degree to which the user is satisfied. The correlation of quality on two axes further led to three unique definitions of quality, namely: basic quality, performance quality and excitement quality.

Kansei
Kansei engineering is a consumer-oriented technology process used to develop products. It uses the consumer’s feelings (kansei) as a guideline in creating the product. In order to do Kansei engineering, one must first determine the Kansei words suitable for the product to be designed. Designers would then create different concepts out of these words. After creating the concepts, these concepts would then be presented to the consumers and rated with the same Kansei words gathered before to determine if the product has matched the Kansei. The rating test contains scales of 1 to 5 with antonym Kansei words on both ends. The process may continue to cycle until the people involved in the development are satisfied with the results.