The Importance of Continuous Improvement
Continuous improvement refers to the process of defining, analyzing, and improving business processes to increase overall quality, while removing as many waste activities as possible.
“Article by Jo Hands, Whiteark Co-Founder & Director”
There are three types of waste in Lean:
1. Muda
The major process wastes including, transport, inventory, motion, waiting, overproduction, over-processing and defects.
2. Mura
The waste of unevenness or inconsistency in your process. It stops your tasks from flowing smoothly across your work process and therefore gets in your way of reaching continuous flow.
3. Muri
The waste of overburden, when you assign too much work to your team, you place unnecessary stress on both your team and process.
If you want continuous improvement to become part of your culture, you need to focus on getting rid of the unevenness/inconsistency wastes (Mura) and overburden wastes (Muri) first. Eliminating all major process wastes (Muda) is almost impossible but focusing on reducing their adverse impacts on your work is key for implementing continuous improvement.
Companies should consider having a funding model for Continuous Improvement initiatives - making changes to processes to increase their profit, improve employee satisfaction, and accelerate productivity and efficiencies. Most often, business budgets do not include an allocation for continuous improvement – and a large amount of money is not required to make a substantial impact. Organisations should create a continuous improvement culture and encourage their people to look for opportunities to improve processes across the business and where the identified opportunities,
Align to the company’s strategic priorities/strategic direction and;
Size up to have biggest impact
There should be a funding model to support these initiatives. To execute on a continuous improvement process, benefits should be associated.
Below is a simple, common model that is used for Continuous Improvement, referred to as the Deming Circle – Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA). This model is a never-ending cycle that aims to help companies improve further based on achieved results.
Phase1 – Plan:
Define the objectives and processes required to achieve the desired goal. Setting output expectations is critical to achieving continuous improvement, as the precision of the goals and their completeness is a fundamental component of the process of improving.
Phase2 – Do:
Apply all that has been considered in the Planning phase. Expect that unpredicted problems may occur, which is why, if it is possible, you should test your plan on a small scale and in a controlled environment. Standardisation will assist with applying the plan smoothly – clear roles and responsibilities are essential.
Phase3 – Check:
Audit your plan’s execution “Do” phase and assess if your objectives and processes and goals from the “Plan” phase worked. To avoid recurring mistakes or if the team identified problems with the process that need to be eliminated in the future you need to undertake a root-cause analysis.
Phase4 – Act:
You developed, applied, and assessed your plan, now you need to act. If everything in “Do” worked well and you were able to achieve the original goals, then you can proceed and apply your initial plan. Your PDCA model will become the new baseline.
The benefits of the PDCAs model, includes: helping your team identify and test solutions and improve them through a waste-reducing cycle, stimulates continuous improvement culture (people and processes), allows your team to test possible solutions on a small scale and in a controlled environment, and prevents the work process from recurring mistakes.
Companies are looking for ways to increase their quality and reduce their costs which is why process improvement has become so important in today’s operating environment for the following reasons: customers have higher quality expectations, strong competition within the market and an unpredictable economic environment.
Whiteark has the expertise to help you with your continuous improvement needs, if this is something your business would like to explore, please reach out to Whiteark for a no obligation consultation.
