Kaizen Blitz: An intensive multiday review of a system or facility with the goal of cutting energy use by 5% to 20% with minimal investment. It typically includes rethinking your system capabilities and limitations, retro-commissioning the system, and reviewing maintenance practices. All key parties are involved in the process, from your in-house staff to your preferred contractors. Read More.


Kaizen Blitz

Our kaizen blitz service is gaining a reputation as the best way to quickly reduce energy consumption and peak demand.

screw compA kaizen blitz is an intensive multiday review of a particular system or your entire facility.  We typically apply this service to industrial refrigeration systems or to an entire facility that includes an industrial refrigeration system.  The approach includes rethinking your system capabilities and limitations, retro-commissioning the system, and reviewing maintenance practices with the goal of cutting energy use by 5% to 10% or more with minimal investment.

“We contracted Cascade to perform detailed energy commissioning at all 46 of our distribution centers, and the result was an average 10% energy savings for all distribution centers, totaling over $2MM per year for the company.”
~Dennis R. Anderson, PMP, The Kroger Company  


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Kaizen is a Japanese word that means "change for the better" or "improvement." The English translation is "continuous improvement." In general, kaizen focuses on eliminating waste, improving productivity, and achieving continuous improvement in targeted activities and processes of an organization.

training staffCascade’s kaizen blitz is a team effort.  Our engineer and technician team with your maintenance and operations staff to make immediate changes while on site, and to formulate an action plan for your staff to execute.  We bring the “fresh set of eyes” and energy-efficiency expertise.  You bring your knowledge and history of your systems and operations.  When appropriate, we draw in your refrigeration contractor, control system vendor, and equipment suppliers to determine the capabilities of the existing equipment or to explore alternate uses or settings.
During the blitz, the team:

  • Identifies inefficient set-points or control strategies that are “band-aids” on a larger underlying problem.
  • Thinks through equipment specifications and system operations to differentiate between real and perceived barriers.
  • Evaluates and measures performance on select components that seem to be underperforming.
  • Looks at many as many system components as possible to identify maintenance tasks that might yield energy savings (for example, dirty coils, scaled condensers, plugged spray nozzles, leaking hot gas valves).
  • Investigates how errors in temperature, pressure and potentiometer calibration might have a hidden energy impact.
  • Reviews control system history to observe how the system responds to varying loads, ambient conditions and production schedules.
  • Brainstorms how minor operational changes might yield major refrigeration savings.

During the blitz we make customer-approved changes on-the-spot, and then create a plan for implementing, over time, additional changes that require further analysis, planning, and staging.