Kaizen Managerial Training for Hanoi's Knitwear Cluster

The knitwear-producing village cluster on Hanoi's outskirts (formerly Ha Tay province, absorbed into Hanoi in 2008) is home to around 160 small, family-run knitwear and garment workshops with almost no access to formal management training.
In 2010, researchers Yuki Higuchi, Vu Hoang Nam and Tetsushi Sonobe randomly assigned local firms to classroom-only, on-site-coaching-only, both, or neither, testing a Kaizen curriculum covering workflow efficiency, waste reduction and basic quality control alongside a parallel trial in a nearby rolled-steel cluster in Bac Ninh province.
Management-practice adoption rose soon after training, but the effect on firms' real value added was initially small and statistically insignificant. By the two-year follow-up in 2012, treated knitwear firms' real value added averaged roughly PPP-adjusted $186,000 against $96,900 for the control group (p=0.03) - the gain emerged with a lag, as firms took time to identify which new practices actually fit their operations. The parallel steel-cluster trial showed weaker results, since steel production offered less scope for the low-cost workflow changes that helped knitwear firms.
The design was later repeated with garment producers in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, making this one of a linked set of Kaizen-training RCTs used to build the evidence base for management-training policy across manufacturing clusters in low- and middle-income countries.

Read the full analysis: https://voxdev.org/voxdevlit/training-entrepreneurs-issue-4/medium-and-large-scale-enterprises-and-high-growth-start