Continuous Improvement Tools 101

Continuous Improvement (CI) programs measure your performance against customer expectations and identify process errors, omissions, inconsistencies or anything else that would negatively impact the efficient flow of successful products to customers.

 Success is achieved when the customer smiles, pays their invoice and places another order.

 In other words, if a customer isn’t happy with what you provide or how you provide it, chances are they aren’t your customer anymore. Not many customers will tell you that to your face; they just walk away to your competitor.

 Methodologies:

            Six Sigma is designed to reduce failures due to variation in our end results. If sometimes we fail and sometimes we don’t fail, then the task becomes:

What do we not do/do differently/do sometimes that causes a failure? How do we avoid this so the result is a “pass” more often or always? What is stopping us from always doing it right?

TPS (Toyota Production System) or “Lean” is a continuous program of reducing the amount of “waste” in a system, thereby reducing costs. It includes front line participation in CI where staff are involved in (and sometimes lead) efforts to improve their efficiency. The underlying theme is “it shouldn’t move unless the move adds value to the customer”.

1. Waste Walks
2. 5S process
3. Kaizen culture (constantly looking at every aspect of the business).
4. What is stopping us from doing it faster and cheaper?

Theory of Constraints (TOC) is a method to analyze blockages or bottlenecks in material flows.

1. How many products can we produce in a day?
2. How can we flow a manufacturing or assembly process more efficiently?
3. What is stopping us from doing more with the same resources?

Using these and other tools to analyze weaknesses in our processes and practices, we can set in place a culture of awareness around us and look to make incremental improvements as we see the value.

 Where to start:

Establish executive champions who want to participate and encourage success

• Define success
  1. When do we make our customer satisfied with our performance in a sale event?
  2. What elements are necessary to entice a customer to call us first next time they need a product or service.
  3. What sets us apart from our competition that is a “value add” to our customer?
• Develop a House of Quality

This is a Six Sigma tool that visualizes the entire business landscape for our business model. It looks at the SWOT elements on a more granular level and can help identify areas of opportunity that we can use to focus our efforts.

• 1. Measure performance accuracy over time. Analyze the failures that prevent successes and determine how to approach each failure using tools like:
     1. Fishbone analysis
     2. Hypothesis testing (H0-H1)

• Discrepancy analysis to determine causation
• Pareto analysis to determine which problem needs to be fixed first.

• Pick as many projects as you have resources available and start

Resources to Start a Program

Any CI program will need certain resource commitments to succeed. Without these in place the risk of individual projects failing is increased and if too many projects fail, people lose interest and stop participating or believing in CI. Before embarking on a CI program s company needs a commitment to see it through, a commitment to foster a new CI culture and a willingness to accept the results and make changes. If any of these are not in place, any CI program will fail.

Starting a Continuous Improvement program can involve a lot of pieces and players. Cross functional teams, inter-generational participation, executive backing; all of these are critical at the beginning as we try to change our culture from “I think this is right” to “I know this works”. Having a framework in place to manage such a program with its myriad of individual projects is necessary so that we can keep focus and not get bogged down.

Leadership is crucial to keep people and timetables on track. Meetings and milestones need to be set in place and monitored and the results communicated upwards to Executive Champions who will set the boundaries, make sure the targets are in line with overall corporate goals and also limit resources as the needs of the corporation change.