Tag: CI and kaizen

Planes, Trains and Automobiles – Japan Lean Experience

Posted on by Richard Steel

This month I am putting together the final touches in preparation for my trip to Japan in April 2018, attending the “Japan Lean Experience” with my colleagues from Tokyo .

This will be my fourth week long homage to the spiritual home of Kaizen and Lean thinking, and I will be traveling with a small band of brothers from NZ seeking inspiration from the world’s leading practitioners of Lean Management.

Our variety of factory tours provide a perfect combination of education, exposure to best-in-class Lean practices, unique relationship building, in-depth tours, interactive discussion, and comfort.

In addition to the formal tours, there will be time to take in some sights and experience Japan culture and of course a ride on the bullet train!

The Shinkansen, or Bullet Train cruises at between 280-320KPH and is one of those experiences that is not to be missed. I confess that this for me is one of the highlights, and epitomizes what Japan is all about, efficient, reliable, high quality and on time!

 

Of course, we have the home of 5S, with everything in it’s place, and a place for everything, there is so much inspiration in their factories, offices and even around town!

 

Japan also has history and culture by the bucket load and there are some amazing things to see and visit whilst you make your way around.

I’ll be adding a few extra days to the tour and our group will take in some of the sights. A personal favourite is Kyoto, the ancient capital, and a deeply religious place.

It is also a place that brings home some of the things that mankind is not so proud of, the atomic bomb. I recommend a visit to Hiroshima for a poignant reminder of the horror of war and devastation it brings.

 

Finally, there’s plenty of great food to try and taste. I am pleased to announce that Japan has pizza and pasta and Hagen Daas ice cream, but the local cuisine is very special and well worth a try!

S A Partners will be running a one week study tour to Japan in the near future.

Japan Lean Experience – Tokai-Shin-ei Electronics

Posted on by Richard Steel

Back in 2009 I  kept a diary of my Japan Lean Experience and I recall that on our 4th day on the road, and after another great lunch at the Gozarase restaurant we travelled for about an hour to Ena-shi Gifuken, the home of Tokai-Shin-ei Electronics.

Tokai-Shin-ei design and manufacture printed circuit boards their factory is located in a small town in the foothills of the central ranges around Nagoya. Tokai-Shin-ei ‘s long standing President,  Yoshihito Takanaka, gave the initial presentation; he informed  us of his corporate philosophy, based on self discipline, employee involvement through Kaizen and a focus on customer value through Total Quality Management primciples.

 

During the Gemba tour it was fascinating, to see the high levels of workplace organisation and cleanliness. The 5S program was adopted in the early nineties, as part of Takanaka’s unique philosophy of developing self discipline across the entire work force which encouraged and sustained a highly clean and organized workplace.

TSK’s market is extremely competitive, and due to its remote location, they had focused on minimizing operating costs, by carefully maintaining and even improving the plant and equipment, to maximize the investment. The adoption of Autonomous Maintenance (TPM) has enabled machinery to last well beyond the normal expectations, hence maximizing the assets and return on capital.

One particular example highlighted during the tour was of a 19 year old machine, which has a normal life expectancy of 5 years!

The overwhelming impression of TSK is that of a dedication to Kaizen, they truly believe that everyone has a part to play in improving the operation for their customers on a daily basis. It is also important to remember that employing just over 100 people in this small town is a significant factor, they seemed proud of being able to withstand the years of fierce competition with one of the best reputations for quality and reliability.

 

5S is certainly a major contributing factor, and without doubt some of the best examples that you will ever see. This must see factory is an absolute highlight, and we are hoping to include a visit in our 2018 Japan Lean Experience tour!

S A Partners will be running a one week study tour to Japan next April.

 

Lean Leadership Workshop – Update

Posted on by Richard Steel

In the same week as our Continuous Improvement conference hosted at Massey University, Chris Butterworth, MD Asia Pacific, led our world class, Lean Leadership seminar in Auckland.

This two-day workshop is designed for business leaders and senior managers looking to embed continuous improvement practices in their organisations, and Chris shares how to create a sustainable continuous improvement culture in addition to the tangible benefits from Lean.

Chris brings a wealth of experience and case studies relevant to NZ organisations who are starting the Lean journey and wish to understand the role that leadership plays in embedding continuous improvement principles as part of the “way of life”.

Many thanks to Chris for bringing Lean to life and sharing his expertise and we’ll look forward to Oct, when he’ll be back!

Workshop Outcomes:

Learn how these results are built upon and sustained also how to engage the workforce and create a sustainable Lean culture.

  • Understand how Lean thinking provides the basis for a profitable, growing and customer focused business
  • Understand the key elements of creating a sustainable culture of continuous improvement
  • Identify the priority actions to achieve this vision and start developing a roadmap to get you there
  • Understand the role of the senior team in creating a Lean enterprise

Auckland Leisure – Shingo Update

Posted on by Richard Steel

Early April saw 16 participants for our Discover Shingo Awareness seminar, kindly hosted by Auckland Leisure and presented expertly by S A Partners.

Our Shingo training is brought to our clients as we are a fully affiliated to the Shingo Institute https://www.shingoprize.org/

The Shingo Training Discover Excellence programme is a foundational, two day workshop that introduces the Shingo Guiding Principles and the Three Insights to Enterprise Excellence. It is designed to raise awareness amongst Leaders and Managers on how Enterprise Excellence can benefit their organisation.

The course is a blend of expert input, discussion and best practice learning combined with real time application of learning via “Go and See” assessments.

On this occasion we were hosted at West Wave Recreation and Leisure Centre which gave the participants the opportunity to apply the learning first hand, to see how Shingo principles drive behaviour throughout the entire organisation to deliver world class results.

At the end of this Shingo workshop participants were be able to:

  • Understand the principles of enterprise excellence.
  • Learn the key insights of ideal behaviours.
  • Understand the relationship between behaviours, systems and principles.
  • Learn how systems and behaviours drive results.
  • Learn how KBI’s drive KPI’s and how this leads to excellent results.
  • Use “Go and See” to understand the practical application of the Shingo Guiding Principles.

Many thanks to Chris for the opportunity to get to grips with Shingo and we look forward to next time and further Shingo insights on your next visits.

Welcome – Tenison Maingay

Posted on by Richard Steel

It is with great pleasure to introduce our latest team member at SA Partners NZ.

Tenison is a recent Massey University Graduate who studied a Bachelor of Engineering (Hons), Majoring in Product Development and minoring in Mechatronics.

Over the past 15 months he has been working for S A Partners New Zealand on a number of business improvement projects. The practical and technical skills learned at varsity have been the foundation for assisting CI specialist teams and client projects with data analysis outlining key opportunities with mathematical reasoning.

Tenison’s specialties are in Total Productive Maintenance and Sustainability.

Tenison began lean education in 2015 and is developing skills through as a Lean Coach the Lean Competency System and practical improvement projects working alongside Richard Steel.

Update from the Auckland CI Conference

Posted on by Richard Steel

Auckland, Sept 7th saw our second annual Continuous Improvement Conference, hosted in partnership with Massey University and Minitab (presentations available for download below).

Above, Chris Butterworth gives the  opening keynote speech to over 80 attendees there on the day, and it was a great opportunity to hear some great stories, learn from others and the lunch was quite good too!

This year’s theme’s were on how to sustain enterprise excellence and some of the leadership challenges in engaging employees in improving value for the customer.

Here’s some of the comments from the attendees:

“Excellent day, good speakers that focused on the Continuous Improvement message over a good variety of industries”

“This was a great session. Affirmation of what I’m doing is correct. Left with some new ideas to implement”

” Great diversity of presentation and content, using real situations, not just theoretical principles, really enjoyed the day!”

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

 

Those that came in our inaugural year commented that they enjoyed the diverse speakers, in particular Mark Powell, Massey and Chris Till from HRINZ, who complimented other speakers who shared their Continuous Improvement stories.

Feedback was very good and in the spirit of Continuous Improvement the Massey and SA Partners team will look to work together on other events and opportunities to showcase empowering people and organisations to reach new levels of performance.

Chris Till MECC conference presentation

Download this Presentation

Mark Powell Conference Presentation

Download this Presentation

Rob McGee's Conference Presentation

View this Presentation

Jonathan Elms conference presentation

Download this Presentation

Nathan's conference presentation

Download this Presentation

Continuous Improvement in the Maintenance Community

Posted on by Alex Everitt

To view, use the link provided.

The authors of this paper challenge the maintenance community with regards to their role and behaviour within a lean transformation journey. They argue that continuous improvement (CI) is integral to successful lean transformation.

However, their experience in the field has led them to believe that maintenance departments and functions are amongst the most difficult groups to engage in CI.

In this paper they offer suggestions as to why that might be the case and lay down the gauntlet for the maintenance community to rise to the challenge that effective improvement presents.

There is also an excellent blog on Continuous Improvement by Prof. Peter Hines.

What’s in a word – The power of language for improving organisational culture

Posted on by Alex Everitt

What’s in a word?

The power of language as a catalyst for improving not only company culture but the bottom-line performance of business is frequently overlooked. But, when it accounts for the vast majority of our communication, isn’t it time we started thinking before we speak?

A huge amount of effort and resources spent on reworking business process doesn’t deliver the promised results because it doesn’t address the culture that sits around it. Among other things, culture is made up of all the small conversations we have on a day-to-day basis but as businesses we often fail to look at this language element when we’re trying to effect change. But when you compare it to modifying human behaviours and values, language is relatively easy to change and can have an immediate impact.

Most people learn contextually- specific patterns of language to use in certain situations. If you think of a sports star with a microphone thrust in front of them, it’s a classic situation when a person might fall into patterns of words and sentences and end up sounding uninteresting and clichéd.

If an organisation promotes success by encouraging people to talk about problems and their solutions, then everybody learns that pattern of language and it forms a culture oriented towards problem resolution.

What we’re trying to do is unpick negative patterns of language and give people new words, phrases and contexts to make their use of language more effective.

The preferred styles for most leaders are what we call advocacy or advisory types of language. These are what you’d expect from senior business people, but both of these styles suggest answers and are not particularly useful if you want to stimulate and encourage people to explore everyday problems.

I recently worked with the leadership team of an automotive plant in Eastern Europe who couldn’t work out why many of the talented people they’d employed didn’t contribute much to the organisation and why their process improvement work had stalled. Their collective psychometric testing indicated a group preference for probing language that almost reached the point of interrogation when the situation was stressful.

After six months of coaching, they had quadrupled the amount of time that their conversations used open questions with an exploratory voice and it had quite a profound effect on company culture and process improvement. Staff felt that they could contribute a lot more and were confident that their voices would be heard, and the management team reported lower levels of stress.

Another interesting example was a senior director who was struggling to control a complex engineering programme, which kept over-running. Through the testing we realised he couldn’t recognise situations where he should use admonishment to control and direct and, as a result, was unable to hold his subordinates accountable for their failure to meet deadlines.

Through coaching, he went through a classic change experience and struggled with confidence for a while, but came out the other side able to assert himself fairly and effectively without appearing to overplay his hand.

Most people want to be more effective at work but often they don’t see language as a barrier to them achieving this. Our experience shows there are some subtle changes they can make to enable them to read and respond to situations more effectively. That can be very empowering for the individual and positive for the organisation.

Robin Jaques will be presenting a workshop in February 2014 titled Accelerating Business Performance – How to create a culture of Business Improvement. Find out more.

This article first appeared in the HSBS Summer edition of Corporate World.

Toyota Kata : Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results

Posted on by Alex Everitt

This game-changing book puts you behind the curtain of Toyota, providing new insight into the legendary automaker’s management practices and offering practical guidance for leading and developing people in a way that makes the best use of their brainpower.

Drawing on six years of research into Toyota’s employee-management routines, Toyota Kata examines and elucidates, for the first time, the company’s organizational routines–called kata–that power its success with continuous improvement and adaptation.

The book also reaches beyond Toyota to explain issues of human behavior in organizations and provide specific answers to questions such as: How can we make improvement and adaptation part of everyday work throughout the organization? How can we develop and utilize the capability of everyone in the organization to repeatedly work toward and achieve new levels of performance? How can we give an organization the power to handle dynamic, unpredictable situations and keep satisfying customers?

With clear detail, an abundance of practical examples, and a cohesive explanation from start to finish, Toyota Kata gives executives and managers at any level actionable routines of thought and behavior that produce superior results and sustained competitive advantage.

You can read a great blog on continuous improvement by Prof Peter Hines.

Purchase this book.

Jonny Wilkinson and Kaizen!

Posted on by Alex Everitt

As an avid reader of fitness and adventure magazines, I actually couldn’t believe what I was reading the other day. Jonny Wilkinson writes a column in ‘Outdoor Fitness’ and in a recent edition he give his opinion on the appeal of sport. This is what he said:

‘One of the most appealing things about sport is the way it fulfils your natural desire to get better. For me, sport has always been about a search for more. The day I stop improving I might as well pack it in.’

One of the ways I achieve the mindset is to follow the Japanese concept of Kaizen, which is about making a change for the better every single day. It might be a small change, like a choice of meal, or something bigger, like the commitment to new training methods. But in effect it is about a process of continual improvement, which makes you commit to bettering yourself. When you think of life in that way, it provides the purpose and motivation you need every day to ensure you never lack the desire to train or improve.

Jonny goes on to discuss how he was introduced to the concept and his coach told him to imagine that you are being videoed every day and to ask yourself these things: Are you happy with what you see? How does it make you feel? Can you see where improvements could be made with only small adjustments?

I have been working with Kaizen for over 20 years.  I started in Toyota over in Japan.  I thought this was a great piece by Jonny and, as an aspiring triathelete, found it really inspirational.

What if all employees and leaders of industry had this same mindset? We would be world-beaters in our manufacturing and other business sectors just like Jonny was in the rugby world cup a few years ago.

I would be interested any views anyone has.

Lose the semantics – improvement is what matters

Posted on by Alex Everitt

Lean is one of a number of improvement methodologies, based on best practice, that have been presented and promoted in recent business and management literature. Others include Total Quality Management (TQM), Six Sigma, Business Process Reengineering (BPR), Just In Time (JIT),  Theory of Constraints (TOC), Kaizen and agile, to name just a few. They all have common aims (minimising waste and resources while improving customer satisfaction and financial results) and common origins (the quality evolution in Japan after the Second World War). They all represent ways of achieving more swift and even flow (Schmenner and Swink, 1998) although with varying emphasis. Most improvement methodologies are both complementary and competitive to Lean. They are complementary in the sense that they may be implemented alongside Lean and are competitive in the sense that they compete with Lean in the market for process improvement methodologies.

In this article for example agile is promoted and lean is misrepresented as having served Dell poorly leading them to outsource to excess and to sacrifice their core competencies.

https://www.business2community.com/marketing/agile-marketing-series-lean-manufacturing-and-the-theory-of-capabilities-0462702?goback=%2Egde_4647638_member_233294967 

The attempt to position these improvement methodologies as, in some way, radically different to each other, is little more than distracting semantics. Organisations that have successfully transformed themselves through improvement should be admired and studied with an open mind whatever labels they have used to. For an in-depth insight into on such organisation’s transformation journey, the Chairman of S A Partners, Professor Peter Hines, recently hosted a free of charge webinar at the end of this month (April 2013).

Professor Hines has spent a lifetime exploring improvement journeys in an impressive range of organisational contexts. His research background means that he has a highly systematic approach to synthesising what he has learned over time. This is reflected in the way he presents the improvement stories of the some of the companies he has worked alongside.

 

Continuous Improvement

Posted on by Alex Everitt

I will still read the wall!

What’s the test to see if Lean is working? Old automotive SQA’s go in the toilet and read the walls, new SQA’s walk on the line and see when the last time the control boards were updated-both great barometers for a Lean continuous improvement journey’s impact.

Real control boards manage the work going on in the area, and the area wouldn’t function without them. Charts should always be dog eared, lines drawn in dry wipe pens, hand prints are great and the best ones have an ogre who appears if you look at them and asks you why you are looking at HIS board.

They should always be the output of deployment, ideally standardised across an organisation and very visual.  All people within an organisation should be part of the deployment process and mentioned on the control boards.

We should have KPI’s and targets that measure all process in terms of input and output, capability around project and incremental improvement, escalations, strategic intent and team training. Anything else for me is a bonus.

Great companies do this but still if you want to know hats really happening read the bog wall. There is another great blog on continuous improvement written by Prof. Peter Hines

 

Deployment Boards in action
Deployment Boards in action

Continuous Improvement and the vital few

Posted on by Alex Everitt

Let the low hanging fruit rot!

In diagnostics people are always looking for the “low hanging fruit”,  “Just do its” and “quick wins”.

I would let the low hanging fruit rot and go looking for the things we have to do. This means our diagnostics have to be completed with rigour and we have to have a thorough understanding of how the business operates and not just a problematic process. Too often people fix the wrong waste.

I have been guilty myself – I improved a change over time from 4 tours to 45 minutes, the business though had 30 presses and only work for 18, their problem lay in sales and not in capacity.

We need to fully understand where the bottleneck lies within an operation and improve this as priority one. Symptom and cause often raises its head, 5 whys have 5 levels to encourage us to dig further. Often process diagnostics alone are not detailed enough,

To achieve true continuous improvement, I believe we should now conduct our diagnostics via a series of lenses, can the organisation surface problems (deployment), can it fix problems (training and management process), are its processes effective and correctly designed (Value stream diagnostics), are the value streams profitable (activity costing) and finally are its people capable of delivering  improvement (change management).

All of us have had experience of the “happy mappers” who spend 10 days diagnosing your business and tell you at the need you need 5s, Kaizen, OEE and Kanban.  Let the low hanging fruit rot and diagnose properly fix the critical parts not the easy parts!

 Let the low hanging fruit rot

 

From Continuous Learning to Organisational Learning

Posted on by Alex Everitt

Kevin Eyre suggests that lean practitioner often ‘get stuck’ at continuous improvement and fail to achieve their aspirations of continuous learning, characteristic of the lean archetype, Toyota. He argues that what we typically refer to as continuous improvement really consists of two types: continuous improvement, rigorously establishing stability whilst relentlessly detecting and eliminating problems at source; and, discontinuous improvement, large-scale and radical change, both planned and unexpected (new product, culture change, new technology). Discontinuous improvement requires high level thinking and integration with the system of continuous improvement. Both continuous and discontinuous improvements are underpinned by Deming’s Plan, Do Check, Act (PDCA) improvement cycle.

Kevin argues that creating continuous and discontinuous improvement is a managerial task. However, the past of creating a climate for organisational learning is a leadership one.  Leaders seeking to achieve real organisational learning will need to be clear on three guiding principles: the notion of the enterprise as a system must be clearly understood; the need to create a safe environment for experimentation must be understood; and, the need to create a management process to capture the learning generated by change and experimentation must be understood.

So Are You Going Lean

Posted on by Alex Everitt

Firstly, what is Lean?

Lean is a continuous improvement process that is aimed to increase value for your customers within your business. Understanding this statement is crucial. Many people seem to think it’s about Cost Cutting and a lot of employees tend to get nervous when they hear the word Lean. This perception is very misguided and implementing cost cutting activities will constrain development and de-motivate an already deflated workforce. The consequence of this cost cutting spiral directly leads to reduced service delivery, less business and with that the business inevitably shrinks. Sound familiar?

Embracing Lean for Growth Programmes in your business should be designed to deliver growth, profits and capacity to deliver more value for your clients. They also should be designed to engage the workforce and improve this deflated moral. Commencing a Lean Journey can take many forms as it’s not a one size fits all, however the common theme is deliver more value for less cost with reduced lead times. Sound Contradictory? Lets hold that thought for a second.

Another misconception about Lean is that it only applies to the operational aspect of the business. If this is what you believe Lean to be, you will never realise the true potential of Lean. At the heart of Lean is understanding ‘Value’ and to go a step further differentiating Value Add from Non Value Add. However before we can differentiate Value from Non Value, we need to define what Value is, and this starts with your customer and what they believe is value. Straight away you can see, that lean needs to operate outside of the traditional realms of operations.

So let’s put on our Customers’ Lens

Lets begin to see things from your customers perspective and ask yourself some questions

  • What part of the product or service are they willing to pay for?
  • Is your quality always at the service level requirements?
  • Do they appreciate you going the extra mile or do they expect it?
  • Do they actually appreciate your product or is it just serving a purpose until something better comes along?

Many more questions can be listed here, however should you still not understand what your client’s value, why don’t you send them a feedback form and ask them directly?

The whole point of this exercise is to discover what part of the service your clients are actually willing to pay for. THAT IS YOUR VALUE to them. So the question is, what are the steps in your business that you do to deliver that Value? Once you can identify those key steps , then everything else is actually considered Non Value Add. If you are still unclear of what Non Value Add is, here are some examples

  • Too many Finished Goods in a warehouse
  • Underutilised / Inappropriate use of resources
  • Overstocking of materials as a ‘just In Case’
  • Entering the same data into multiple IT systems

There are many more examples, and every company has them. Understanding all this information is imperative in building up a picture of the Current State of the Business. And looking at the figure on the left, on average more than 50% of what a business does is actually not adding any value. So why are we doing it? There are many different reasons for this, mostly organic and historic, however once we can realise this, the opportunities to create plans to eradicate and mitigate these wasteful activities becomes tremendous. However please beware while certain things are not valuable in the eyes of the customer, they are absolutely necessary to survive, e.g. support functions. As you can see from the charts, there are certainly opportunities to optimise these also.

So what are the improvements?

So lets have a look at the image below. The top aspect describes a business that’s has not undertaken a Lean for Growth Progamme. Using the criteria above, adding the non value with value add in a typical business, only then, can you deliver your service to your client. Then post-delivery, there is also lead time to wait to get paid for your service.

Through the thoughtful and contingent application of Professor Peter Hines’ Lean Business Model ®, businesses are not only realising additional capacity, eliminating wastes and inefficiencies through increased customer focus, they are also identifying ways of filling this capacity and achieving profitable growth, as the figure below illustrates. Simply put, you are doing less work and achieving the same results, therefore this is costing you less. Along with that, you are also delivering your service to your client in less time, thus improving service delivery AND the cycle to payment greatly improves. This greatly improves overall business health. With this you have automatically created capacity within the business so you can do more Value with the same resources.

So can you now see the opportunities and method in that somewhat contradictory statement above? Should this not be apart of any Formal Business Model? Lean for Growth is not something that should be dismissed lightly, in essence Lean is about Operations and Business Excellence that will give your business the competitive advantage which, in these economic times is crucial.

Lean thinking is successfully driving profitability in many Irish companies today. If you have not looked into the funding available from Enterprise Ireland then your competitor is probably ahead of you in the queue.
Lean thinking is about business growth and right now in Ireland we need lots of that. Customers make Jobs.

Continuous Improvement Should Be About Small Steps?

Posted on by Alex Everitt

Following my blog of 18th April I asked you:

* What type of improvement is really necessary for an organisation?

Over 120 of you took the trouble to vote. The answers are in, with:

39% Continuous Improvement: small steps

2% Discontinuous Improvement: big steps

14% Process Improvement: end-to-end

4% Extended Enterprise Improvement

42% All of these

What does this tell us? Well over 80% of you think that small step local improvement should be part of a lean programme, whilst considerably less see lean should be about big step continuous improvement. However, what I see is almost everyone does big step improvement, be it senior management projects or black belt projects. The problem here is that these tend to be imposed on people lower in the organisation and feel like lean is being done to them or PUSHED. This often leads to tissue rejection.

Continuous Improvement and Pull

What I have found is that lean needs to be PULLED by local teams based on a coherent deployment of the needs of the business and customers as well as their needs of the local team to make their jobs easier and to reduce frustration.

Read this other blog about continuous improvement by Prof. Peter Hines

Continuous Improvement, What is it?

Posted on by Alex Everitt

Continuous Improvement Definition

Continuous improvement is a never-ending effort to expose and eliminate root causes of problems; small-step improvement as opposed to big-step or radical improvement. Synonym: Kaizen

Many organisations use Continuous Improvement (or sometimes Kaizen) as their flagship name for a lean approach. However, what they mean is often not what they say or to misquote a UK TV advert ‘it does not do what it says on the tin’.

This raises two questions about continuous improvement:

  • What is Continuous Improvement (or Kaizen) and
  • What type of improvement is really necessary for an organisation.

In answer to the first we could say that Continuous Improvement is those small steps (or kaizen activities) usually taken by local teams in order to create a culture of local improvement. However, what I see the term used for by most businesses is ANY type of improvement, be it small steps, big leaps or complete business restructuring.

So, in answer to the second question, what system of improvement is really needed for an organisation? Well, I believe there are AT LEAST four systems that are required. These are:

1.    Continuous Improvement:

i.e. the small step improvements that I describe above undertaken by every small local team across the organisation that can be implemented in a few minutes to a few hours. This, I believe is about creating a real culture change in a business. However, rarely in my travels do I see companies really doing this type of improvement.

2.    Discontinuous Improvement:

i.e. the large, usually business level, projects that are required to make a major step change and require many weeks or months of work. These projects, typically led by senior staff or Black Belts, are usually far to large in number, take too long and end up meaning that senior staff end up drowning in project overload….does this sound familiar to you!!! If it does it is probably because you do not have an effective Continuous Improvement and Organisational Learning system in place.

3.    Process Improvement:

i.e. improvements in the end-to-end processes in the organisation. This is in theory what Value Stream Mapping should help with as it is important to look at what needs to be done right across the organisation not just in one department. However, Value Stream Mapping suffers from three drawbacks. First, it is usually done in isolation of a genuine local Continuous Improvement framework required to implement the changes. Second, it is usually done by experts such as Black Belts who then impose (or push) solutions on busy middle managers who don’t perceive the need for change. Third, mapping is usually only ever applied to one process, namely Order Fufilment…as this is the process almost always described in the textbooks on mapping.

4.    Extended Enterprise:

i.e. taking a similar process based view but here extending it further across as much of the extended enterprise as is possible.

I guess this raises a further two question in my mind: which of these systems of improvement are you managing, and more importantly which should you be managing?

Why not sign up for our newsletter and get alerts when we post new content on events, blogs, white papers etc. You can also see how we create the framework for sustained improvement by viewing our video.