Continuous Improvement (Part 2): Exploring Culture, Processes, and Tools
In this blog series, we explored how visionary leaders drive continuous improvement. Part 1 discussed their skills, while Part 2 covers cultural requirements, processes, and tools for implementation.
How is a matured Continuous Improvement culture?
In an organisation where a matured Continuous Improvement culture exists:
leadership encourages its employees to assess and improve their processes, products and services.
provides employees training to acquire the required knowledge and to implement recognised tools
facilitates through established tools, procedures and processes the communication of those ideas and proposals.
collects data and assesses trends to aid the decision-making process and to be based on factual information.
learns from experience
is customer focused
awards those employees that achieve better results and implement new ideas
counts with continuous improvement departments or project managers for more complex projects.
quality is within the DNA of the organisation.
Popular Continuous Improvement processes
An organisation can adopt different Continuous Improvement processes across the different areas. The PDCA and Lean processes as Kaizen are the most known processes.
In accordance with ISO 9001, the standard that provides a framework from implementing a Quality management System, Continuous Improvement is achieved through the process of Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA). The PDCA cycle is a continuous loop of improvement, where the results of each cycle inform the planning phase of the next cycle, leading to ongoing improvements in quality management. It is the most common approach and involves the following phases:
Plan: Establishing objectives and processes to deliver results in accordance with customer requirements and the organisation's policies.
Do: Implementing the processes.
Check: Monitoring and measuring the processes against policies, objectives, requirements, and results, and reporting the results.
Act: Taking actions to continually improve process performance based on the results of the monitoring, measurement, analysis, and evaluation.
Kaizen is a philosophy of continuous improvement that aims to make small, incremental changes to processes and systems. It involves planning, analysing, implementing, reviewing, standardizing, and repeating improvement cycles to drive ongoing enhancements. All employees are involved, fostering a culture of collaboration and learning.
There are different ways to implement Kaizen but without being a Lean expert I would recommend taking a PDCA approach along RCA (Root Cause Analysis).
Enabling Continuous Improvement tools
There are diverse enabling and recognised tools and approaches than can be used to facilitate within the organisation the implementation of Continuous Improvement processes and that will help to booster its culture.
From experience, everything starts having an efficient system to collect data. This data can be collected through Performance Indicators and trend analysis but as well from employees proposing ideas as users of the organisational processes.
These ideas can be communicated or generated by the employees using the following tools and approaches:
Sending ideas to a specific e-mail address or suggestion box
Writing the ideas on a board available in the different operational areas
Management performing walk arounds / meeting their teams and collecting ideas
During Problem Solving Sessions
By implementing 5S process (methodology that results in a workplace that is clean and well organised). For more information I recommend this link of the American Society fir Quality (ASQ) regards What are the S’S (5S) of Lean
Brainstorming sessions
Next, ideas need to be developed and prioritised prior progressing the projects.
Conclusions
As we have seen through Part 1 and Part 2 of the Continuous Improvement posts, there are a variety of benefits, being the main ones the increase of operational efficiency, saving costs and reducing waste (such as time, resources, money).
However, there are other intangible benefits such as the empowerment of the workforce giving the ability to implement changes and improvements that will reinforce the engagement and the culture and result in a dynamic organisation with the ability to continuously learn and improve. Ultimately, it can also result in an increased customer satisfaction. This is why tracking the Return of Investment (ROI) could become challenging and shouldn’t be reason for not embracing a Continuous Improvement culture.
For the above reasons, I really encourage organisations to incorporate Continuous Improvement within their strategy and to invest on specific resources/specialist to manage and to implement the initiatives, but without excluding keys employees.
Resources
Sky High Standards by Irene - Continuous Improvement (Part 1): The Winning Formula through Visionary Leaders
American Society fir Quality (ASQ): What are the S’S (5S) of Lean