So...what is Continuous Improvement?

Recently I’ve been mentoring someone who wanted to fully understand what continuous improvement is and it got me thinking about the words and meaning of this phrase in depth.

The words ‘continuous improvement’ can cause confusion. It actually means business improvement in its widest sense. Business improvement is a way to look at how to make business processes better, so that the things we do daily in our teams, or in our job roles, are easier to manage.

Some of the work that we do daily crosses over and affects the processes of other teams. For example, a new client starts working with us and they are desperate to place an order with us. Having this new customer is brilliant for us as for example we are a medium sized organisation and they will provide us with, not just long-term revenue, but the prestige we gain by winning their business.

Behind the scenes, before they can sign off on the deal, they must still obtain approval from finance, via a governance process, which may take some time.

From a business development point of view, the governance process should be sped up but to do this the process needs to be reviewed step by step to check if it’s possible.

When we look to change any process steps, it is called business improvement. If we keep looking at this and other business processes on a regular basis, this is called continuous improvement as we are making small changes over time, and we keep trying to improve across the organisation on a continual basis.

Another example of continuous improvement would be where we have a service department that sends technicians out to repair a specific fault on a piece of equipment that we manufactured.

The technician receives a job through his PDA or the internal network. The details of that job are written by someone in either a call centre or captured online and passed onto the operations team and onward allocated to a specific technician.

The technician then attends site, and it is discovered that the problem is outside their skill set or training and therefore must be escalated back to the operations centre and onto another technician. An alternative issue can be that the technician attends site and has the technical skills and training to fix the problem but does not have the equipment required within their van stock.

Either way, this problem cannot be rectified, and the customer must wait longer than expected to have the item(s) repaired.

Now, this customer may be a consumer, or they might form part of a corporate or enterprise organisation.

The work required might form part of a service level agreement with a penalty built into the contract between the parties and that means that every time this happens the penalty will have to be paid.

On top of the penalty, there is an issue with time and money being wasted every time a technician attends site without the ability to fix the problem. If this happens regularly, the costs to the business will be substantial, especially if there are multiple technicians affected.

We can look at this issue a few ways; firstly can the call centre provide more information remotely so that the technician has more information to hand and is aware of the van stock issue. There could also be information routed to each party on a regular basis regarding current van stock availability. Also, can the technicians all be trained to the same standard, so there are no weak points. This ensures that the person sent out will always have the correct skillset and equipment.

Just implementing one or more of these changes will make a substantial difference. If you then look at making small changes across the organisation on a regular basis, you are starting to deploy continuous improvement. You are putting strategies in place to manage tricky and problematic processes and implement ways to make them easier.

Without this background information when we start using the phrase ‘continuous improvement’, we risk people getting confused and them wondering what on earth it means.

What I want to do as a training consultant is to provide all of your teams with the business improvement tools, I have learned throughout my working life, so they can start to use them in their work and make changes to everything they do quickly and easily.

Continuous improvement is all about making small changes to make things a bit better. It’s not about making massive changes all in one go.

Start by bringing everyone on board, starting to empower them to understand the purpose of what you are proposing, allowing them to make decisions and feel part of any changes that you’re making. You will then find that teams start to work together using these new tools to make a difference and move the company forward together

It won’t happen all at once; it will be a gradual process, but everyone needs to play their part. Empower your team to make decisions and feel part of the process. After all, you are all in this together.

Hope you've had a wonderful Bank Holiday Weekend.

Liz

If you are interested in finding out about Continuous Improvement training courses or would just like to have a chat about how to make your business processes more streamlined, just send me a message or click here.