Do you want to make positive changes in your organization or team? Do you want to learn how to apply proven methods and tools to improve your processes, products, and services? Do you want to get certified in continuous improvement and boost your career? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then this course is for you.

In this course, you will learn the fundamentals of continuous improvement, such as its purpose, benefits, and challenges. You will also discover how to use key concepts such as Lean & Six Sigma to achieve high-impact results. You will gain practical skills and knowledge that you can apply to your own projects and business. You will also earn a continuous improvement certification that will demonstrate your competence and credibility to your employers, clients, and peers.

This course is designed for anyone who wants to learn and practice continuous improvement, whether you are a beginner or an expert. You will get access to engaging and interactive content, such as videos, quizzes, and case studies. You will also get feedback and support from experienced instructors and fellow learners. By the end of this course, you will be able to use continuous improvement to reduce waste, improve quality, and enhance innovation.

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn, improve, and get certified in continuous improvement. Enroll in this course today and start your continuous improvement journey!

Click here to Learn More

Only logged in customers who have purchased this product may leave a review.

The SIPOC is one of the best known and most effective process mapping tools out there. Used extensively in projects utilising the Lean Six Sigma methodology, the SIPOC is there to help you:

1. Understand the current state.
2. Understand the key players in the process.
3. Understand the key inputs and outputs of your process.

It acts as the bedrock of any project where you are looking to deploy process improvements, process changes or are just trying to understand better the flow of information and products through your process from the initiator through to your final customer.

Standing for Supplier, Input, Process, Output, Customer, the SIPOC tool gives you a lot of great insight into a process very quickly. In this course, you will:

• Learn what a SIPOC is.
• Learn how to effectively deploy a SIPOC.
• Be taken through a breakdown of each section of the SIPOC.
• Be taken through a number of demonstrations, based on different scenarios in different industries.

The course also gives you the templates and tools you need so once you have completed the course, you can get started on a SIPOC right away. Quizzes and assignments along the way will also help in your learning journey.

When you finish this course, you will have the knowledge, the experience and the confidence to deploy a SIPOC in your next project.

Only logged in customers who have purchased this product may leave a review.

In the 2^nd of our articles looking at process improvement in business, we will explore the process you need to follow in order to successfully deliver the change you want to see, as well as the 8 wastes. The 8 wastes of lean are those wastes which often occur within business processes, spurring them on to make changes and improvements to reduce said waste. It is important to know not only the process to follow in order to deliver process improvement in business but also the types of waste you may see, spurring you on to launch the improvements you want to see.

In case you have missed Part: 1 Click Here to Read

To actually deliver process improvement in a business is not as simple as mapping and changing. There will often be a process behind this to ensure you have thought through every step, and every eventuality and deliver the right reforms and improvements for that particular process. Let’s explore this approach.

The first activity you need to conduct is to identify that a process is in need of improvement. As we mentioned before, there will often be a trigger to indicate a change is required. Here, you need to acknowledge that trigger, identify which process this is referring to and clearly define this process. Many processes interlink with other processes, so try to define the scope of your process clearly here.

To do this, you can create a grid to highlight the important metrics around the process and see how they are ranking against what you would expect, and what you would want from a future state-reformed process. These metrics could include their current performance regarding SLAs and KPIs, customer and employee satisfaction, errors, and time taken to complete, to name but a few. It will depend on what is important for you and your organization.

As discussed earlier, you need to map out the process as it stands today. This effort will involve engaging with the SMEs of the process (as they can help you map the realities of the process), communicating effectively with all involved so they are aware of what needs doing and why you are conducting this work and then getting into a workshop and map the process. As you do this, remember to have in-depth conversations, asking questions about issues and opportunities faced.

Once the process is mapped, you can work with your team to identify which steps in the process are adding value, and which are not. To conduct this exercise, you can colour code the steps in RAG format – red for steps which do not add value, green for steps which do ad value and amber for those steps which do not add value but are required.

This is a powerful exercise to do with your team, as you can all stand back and see just how much waste is in the process, and how many opportunities to increase the value of the process and their work there is. This effort will help you to get buy-in from the wider team to continue on with this work because once everyone graphically sees the opportunities in front of them, they will be more motivated to continue the work.

Now you can see the extent of waste and opportunity within your process, you can effectively design your future state-to-be process. This can involve the simple removal of all of those steps which have been deemed non-value-adding steps (anything in red), the attempted reform at anything deemed non-value add but necessary (anything in amber) and the strengthening and potential increase of those steps identified as value-adding steps (anything in green).

When you conduct this activity, you will need to ensure the process can, in the to-be state, run from the starting point to the ending point without any issues.

Armed with your as-is and to-be process maps, you can now conduct your gap analysis. At this stage, we can revisit all of those process steps and activities that we removed from our as-is process map to try and understand if we can actually remove all of these process steps, uninterrupted. The gap analysis here is to assist you in avoiding risk, specifically, the risk of removing steps from the process and something falling down later down the line. (You would be shocked to know just how many companies remove steps from their processes without testing whether or not this is actually feasible, and then experiencing big problems at a later date. Do not fall into this trap – conduct your gap analysis).

At this stage you will play around with your maps, testing each step removed and any new steps added in to see if the new steps continue to guarantee the success of the process, they achieve what they are built to achieve and that the steps that have been removed can successfully remain removed from the process.

This step should be quite straightforward, given the majority of the process would have been built during the gap analysis stage. At the end of that stage, you will often see the final process. At this stage, you need to create the final map, as you want it to be shared with wider stakeholders. Any evidence of the gap analysis, any colouring (RAG) and commentary should be removed. You can at this stage add in any control measures you think may be needed to keep the process in check – just be mindful you do not add in wasteful, non-value-adding steps.

Now you have your new process mapped and ready to go, you can test it. This can be relatively straightforward, depending on what you did during the gap analysis stage. If you stress-tested steps at that stage, you should be in a better position now to trust the steps. However, you should still test the new process. This test can come in the form of using dummy data and dummy runs to test or parallel running the new process alongside the as-is process, testing the process with live data and scenarios. Either testing approach can be highly effective at ensuring the process works.

When testing, remember to be very clear on what you want the outcome of the new process to be. What products and services should be coming out of the process? What level of quality are you expecting the product and services to now be in compared to before? How much quicker do you want the process to run compared to before? What is your tolerance level for errors and issues? Set your parameters clearly and test against these.

The final step of a process improvement is one that is often overlooked – to update the wider business on the changes made. It is important to remember that the process changes will not necessarily just impact the immediate team, and indeed there could be a ripple effect across the wider business. Make sure everyone who needs to be updated has been, with a breakdown of the changes and the new process map.

When running through your processes and identifying waste, it can often be helpful to identify what type of waste you are dealing with or are searching for. This is because, sometimes, waste is not as obvious as you may think, and therefore you need to know what you are searching for. With that in mind, there is an approach to waste known as the 8 wastes which people who deploy process improvement often follow. Let’s explore what these 8 wastes are.

Transport waste can be generated by the moving of things from one location to another. It can be generated by the location of resources being vastly spread out, geographically and lead to huge amounts of time waste being built into a process – time wasted waiting.

Examples of transport waste include handoffs between departments, sending and resending emails or information and moving goods from warehouse to warehouse.

The causes can include poor office/warehouse layout, unnecessary steps within a process or having too many sites to operate your business from.

Solutions to transport waste can include simplifying processes by reducing handoffs, prioritising what needs to be sent and to whom and having centres of excellence from where all operations run.

Waste in inventory occurs when more products or services are stored or created than the customer has asked for. This can lead to a backlog of products and services that then need to be cleared through.

Examples of this type of waste include stockpiling of supplies, often just in case, a backlog of data waiting to be entered or the storing of information for longer than is required.

Causes could include poor monitoring systems, unreliable suppliers and misunderstood customer needs.

Solutions could revolve around providing a greater focus on the voice of the customer, a Kanban system for workflow to be introduced and a review of the suppliers.

Motion waste refers to any action that does not add value to the product, service or process. This action could be conducted by a human or a system, but it is something which does not positively impact the final output. This type of waste often occurs when we see something “repetitive” happening.

Examples of this type of waste include repetitive keystrokes (manual intervention), walking between equipment in the office and switching between applications on the computer.

Causes of motion waste can include poor office/workstation layout, poor process design (therefore requires manual steps) and congestion on equipment.

To solve this waste, you could rearrange layouts to reduce the need to move, ensure enough equipment is available for all and resign processes to reduce the manual and repetitive steps.

Waiting occurs whenever work or a process has to stop. In this instance, the process flow is disrupted by something which needs addressing, fixing or simply waiting for. The most common type of waiting waste is when you have to wait for someone within the process to complete their work before you can resume yours.

Examples of this type of waste include waiting for sign-off from another department, waiting for a part to be delivered to the site or waiting for a 3^rd party provider to send over their data.

Causes of this type of waste can include work absences, poor communication and unbalanced workloads.

To help address this type of waste, you can ensure each worker has a delegate, implement tighter SLAs around when sign-offs are required and review the spread of workload across the team, ensuring it is balanced and fair and there is no risk of a backlog.

Overproduction occurs when workers produce more and more data/goods, often when there is no real demand from the customer or the market for this. It can be the case that no orders have been placed for these products or services, but the provider is creating them “just in case” the demand does come. Organizations that create products and services “just in case” are often plagued with this type of waste.

Examples of overproduction would include too much data being produced, additional unread reports being produced and the manual storage of digital documents.

Causes of this type of waste include producing things “just in case” demand comes in, not knowing your customer requirements as clearly as you should or changes to your process not being communicated out.

Solutions for this waste could include creating an audit report to reduce the volume of products being produced in line with demand, developing a more effective way to understand customer needs and producing only the required amount of data, no more.

Overprocessing waste occurs when we have the creation of multiple versions of the same task. This can lead to the production of multiple versions of the same product or the processing of something additional for no purpose. Rework loops are most commonly associated with this type of waste, something which plagues many processes across all organizations.

Examples of this type of waste include excessive reports being created, the same process having to be run time and time again as something has gone wrong (rework loop) or needing multiple signatures.

Causes of this type of waste can include poor communication, human error and the misunderstanding of customer needs, often because the method by which customer needs are established is wrong or not fit for purpose.

Solutions for this type of waste can include eliminating unnecessary sign-offs, vetting all requests for reports to ensure they do not already exist and giving each process an owner to avoid any confusion.

Defects refer to mistakes that are made when running a process to deliver a service or product. These defects, also referred to as errors, cause problems for your processes, making you spend more time completing the process, fixing the issues that arise from the errors and dealing with the fallout.

Examples of defects can include missed deadlines, missing or incorrect data and the wrong file being uploaded to a system.

Causes of such defects can include documentation being out of date (including work instructions), customer needs being miscommunicated and there being a lack of controls and checks and balances in the process.

To solve this type of waste, you can ensure all documentation is up to date, quality check data ahead of the upload into a system and root cause every defect that occurs to identify the right controls for the future.

Skills waste is often related to the non-utilisation of skills in your organization. There can be a wealth of skills individuals in a business harbour, but due to the nature of their roles or the understanding from management of the skills they have, these skills are not utilised in the way they should be. Not utilising such skills can be a significant waste for an organization.

Examples of skills waste include assigning staff to the wrong tasks, not bringing in the Continuous Improvement Team to improve processes when required and not knowing the extent of the skills that make up the team.

Causes of this type of waste include poor communication of the skillset available and that which is required, poor management (not seeing what skills their team have) and a lack of teamwork.

Solutions for this type of waste can include conducting a skills matrix and keeping the document live, better-defining roles and responsibilities within projects and management being trained to better recognise skillsets and upskill their teams.

Process improvement in business, as I hope you can now see, is a powerful tool that can deliver fantastic results. Whilst the end result, an improved process, will always be the same aim, how we get there will be different depending on the process in question, the team running the process and the needs of the business. With process improvement in business, it is always important to remember the ripple effect it can have on an organization. Deliver it well, and process improvement can set your organization up for big success over the long term.

Improving your business often starts with the processes which make up your operations. These are the lifeblood of your organization, delivering products and services through a range of activities and by a range of people and departments. Therefore, making sure these are working effectively and efficiently is crucial to the success of your business improvement efforts.

To do this, there are a number of different approaches you need to take and techniques you need to deploy. We will look at 5 steps in Business Process Improvement, listed down in chronological order of what you need to focus on first before you can move on to the next.

It is vitally important you identify those processes truly in need of support and reform. Processes that should be in scope for this type of work are those that are leading to problems with your products or services, complaints from customers or employees. They will be those processes that may be taking longer to complete than they once did, have become wasteful and bloated. By identifying the right process here, you can unblock them through your work, ensuring outputs get to the right place quicker and in better shape.

Look at the data, have conversations with those involved and try to establish specifically which process is in scope for this work. Clearly state the name of the process, where it starts and where it ends. Being very clear on the scope of the process itself will help you avoid scope creep later on.

Gather together your team, focusing on those who work in and run the process as part of their day job. Run a process mapping workshop where you will map the process out, end to end. This will include all activities, hand offs, departments, decision points, flows of data, information etc. Everything that happens within the process will need to be clearly presented on this graphic. To do this, a flowchart is the most popular type of process map to show such required information.

Once mapped, you need to walk through the flow of the map. Ensure everyone is in agreement with what has been mapped, the flow of information and work through the process, the starting and end point, and note down any discrepancies here. This map is going to be vitally important moving forward.

With the map complete, you now need your team to dive into the detail about how the process is currently performing. Walk the process and note down any information you believe will be important at this stage. What issues are being faced and where do they currently reside? Which steps are proving problematic? Which hand offs are causing the greatest delays? Can you highlight time taken or cost of to any of the activities? Are there blockers, rework loops, bottlenecks etc. that are completely halting parts of the process or causing errors?

All of this insight will help you to identify the solutions to any of the problems you face pretty quickly. As you are moving through your workflow and conducting this work, it often becomes quite apparent where the focus of improvement efforts need to be and potentially, what solutions you should think about.

You will again revisit the map, but this time to think about what it is required to fix the problems you are facing. How can we remove step X? How do we reduce waste in this process? How can we speed up delivery time? Etc. All of these questions will be asked as you run another workshop to discuss the changes that are required. This will involve the use of root cause analysis tools, such as a Fishbone Diagram or 5 Whys to understand why your problems are occurring in the first place, enabling you to focus on the right solutions.

You will also run some brainstorming exercises, including using Affinity Diagrams, to land on your chosen solutions. This will involve generating ideas, discussing their metrics and challenges and then landing on which ones to take forward. Again, you will need consensus on the solutions chosen to maximize their chances of success.

Finally, you need to deploy your solutions in full for Business Process Improvement. This will require the team to all pitch in and deliver their aspects of the solutions. You may run this part as a full project, depending on the nature and size of the changes proposed. This step will require a number of additional activities such as communications out to the wider business, a workshop to process map the new process that has been deployed (if changes to the actual process have been made) and the identification of good controls you are putting in place to ensure the changes last the test of time.

Really key at this stage is ensuring you collect the benefits of this deployment, and measure them against what you originally set out to do. Have you achieved or exceeded your original targets? Have you seen the reduction in errors, issues or problems you had hoped? Has waste now vastly reduced, with products and services getting to market quicker and in better quality? Knowing this and showing it to the business will help you build your case for further, bigger business process improvement projects, keeping the ripple effect of your changes spreading out across your organization for years to come.

Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel: Leading Business Improvement

Business process improvement is a highly in demand and powerful technique which, if deployed effectively, can yield substantial results for your organization. The focus is on the process, but the benefits can be felt in your procedures, people and products, your clients, customers and colleagues. To understand how Leading Business Improvement can help you achieve business process improvement better, faster and more focused, why not follow in the footsteps of many of our clients and get in touch with us today – or try one of our related courses.

We have written this article to educate you on continuous improvement. The reason for this is that I believe, continuous improvement can often get a bad name. That is because, in many organizations, continuous improvement is deployed badly, incorrectly or by those who don’t truly know how to deploy it or have any shred of passion for it.

Indeed, in the many organizations with which I have worked, I have seen continuous improvement deployed badly or incorrectly time and time again. You have people delivering it that don’t have the right training or qualifications. You have managers that lead on it but don’t really have the passion for it. You have teams who have been sold the vision and purpose of it incorrectly, therefore they don’t know how and when to properly utilise their Continuous Improvement Team.

In this article, I want to run through what continuous improvement is, how it can be deployed, its benefits, indicators and different potential approaches. When deployed correctly, continuous improvement can generate some really fantastic results, repeated time and time again to great effect, setting your organization up for long-term sustainable success, today.

The fundamentals of continuous improvement

What is continuous improvement?

At a definition level, continuous improvement is the ongoing improvement of products, services and processes through incremental and breakthrough improvements. When it comes to this definition, notice the stress on the word ongoing. Continuous improvement is not a one-off activity, or at least it shouldn’t be. Continuous improvement is an activity that should be occurring yesterday, today and tomorrow. It is something that should be embedded into the culture and the daily activities of the staff, the managers and the leadership.

The aim of continuous improvement is to improve the state of something, then improve it again, and again. It is the continual effort to get something to be operating as effectively, efficiently and as productively as possible, removing waste, errors and bottlenecks, whilst increasing value and opportunities. How you achieve these things depends on a raft of criteria, such as your business needs, the resources at its disposal and the level of acceptance of change you have within the culture of your business.

It goes without saying. Those organizations with open, accepting cultures who embrace and celebrate change are the ones who will do significantly better in their continuous improvement journeys.

The purpose of continuous improvement

When it comes to understanding the purpose of continuous improvement, it is important to remember the desired outcome of any work done in this space. Every organization, team or project will have a different outcome in mind, based on their needs at that time. These needs can evolve, and that is why continuous improvement can be so effective. It is not done just one time and no more – it happens again and again and can evolve with the needs of the organization.

When seeking to embark on a continuous improvement initiative, it is really important you are clear from day 1 exactly what you want to outcome of your work to be – what is the purpose? There can be many purposes of continuous improvement, and they can cover the following:

Reduction of waste, improvement of quality, ensuring the achievement of SLAs and KPIs, reducing the cost of doing business, increasing financial savings to be banked for future investment, increasing time savings for future investment, upskilling of teams and departments, improving processes and delivering operational excellence throughout, improving team mindset and the culture of the team / wider organization, proactively and reactively reducing issues and errors, embedding innovation and competitiveness into the heart of the organization, plus many MANY more.

As you can see, the purpose, the reason and the motivating factor behind why you may want to deliver continuous improvement can vary greatly, and each project, process and approach can have different purposes. What matters here is – what suits the needs of the business, today.

Scenario

The procurement department has, recently, been procuring services from unsuitable potential providers. They have been scheduling meetings, and demonstrations and discussing commercials way ahead of time.

This is leading to a big waste of time for the procurement department itself, as well as others within the business who are being called upon from an SME perspective to support in those meetings.

We are also seeing a delay in the procurement of new services and concerns raised across the business.

Increase in complaints from internal stakeholders, several hours a week now wasted for the procurement and related teams, and disaffected potential future suppliers (complaints about your organization wasting their time).

Upon investigating why this was happening, it became apparent there was no effective RFI process in place, there were no checks and balances in the procurement team (and often in the 3^rd party) and a lack of knowledge of what was needed.

A continuous improvement initiative was launched. This saw the building of a new RFI process, upskilling the team and changing their SOPs. CI was also embedded by continually reviewing the approach and building robust control measures.

The purpose here was to use CI to build a new, more effective approach to procurement to proactively reduce issues.

The benefits of continuous improvement

Tied very much with the purpose of continuous improvement, it is also worth thinking about the benefits. When you are looking to pitch or sell your vision for continuous improvement to leaders and those who will have to give it sign-off, they will be looking for the benefits. What is the return on investment of any time spent doing this work or money spent delivering the solutions that come from this work? With that in mind, it is really important you get clear on the benefits of what you are doing early on, just as you need to do with the purpose. By doing so, you are far more likely to get buy-in and support from wider stakeholders.

When it comes to the benefits, this will largely depend on what it is you are trying to achieve, why and how. With that said, there are a range of benefits that can come from continuous improvement that can often be applied across a range of initiatives. The kinds of benefits can include the following:

Delivering a new culture, one that is stronger, more open, transparent and collaborative, reducing the cost of doing business, reducing the waste within your processes and operations, guaranteeing better quality of products and service year on year, shifting the work done to more value-adding in nature, ensuring the faster delivery of products and services to market, putting innovation at the heart of the organization’s strategy, reducing errors and defects, reducing risk to the business both today and in the future, making the organization more streamlined, agile and competitive, improving customer satisfaction and employee engagement, plus many MANY more.

As you can see, the benefits of successfully delivering continuous improvement are vast and are many. That is why, throughout this article, I will stress the importance of not just delivering continuous improvement, but delivering it correctly. Only then can such benefits be truly realised.

How NOT to deploy continuous improvement

Just as with delivering continuous improvement for positive benefits, and potentially experiencing that positive ripple effect across the organization, continuous improvement can be deployed incorrectly. Indeed, the continuous improvement being deployed incorrectly has become commonplace in a lot of organizations that don’t truly understand it, don’t have the right level of training amongst their team or have not set the right goals, challenges and metrics against continuous improvement team performance.

With that said, there are a number of key things you SHOULD NOT do when it comes to delivering continuous improvement. Here are 6 of them:

1. Delivering projects with no control measures.

Delivering new processes, changes, reforms, improvements or entire projects and not ending this work with a control phase can be fatal. Many individuals and organizations don’t fully grasp the importance of putting strong control measures in at the end of such work, to ensure the changes last the test of time. What often happens when such measures are not put in place, is all of that hard work unravels and creates more issues than were there to begin with.

2. No methodology.

If the managers in the continuous improvement team or the team members themselves are not fully skilled in this art, many will not know about the great array of methodologies out there, designed to help with the delivery of continuous improvement. I remember one time working with a team and I mentioned that they should probably take a Plan Do Check Act approach for their small project, and they had no clue what I was talking about. There were no qualified Lean Six Sigma belts present – nothing. Safe to say, this team was not producing the high-quality positive outputs they should have been.

3. No goals or targets.

Many organizations who don’t truly understand continuous improvement, often do not know how to set goals and targets for its successful completion. If you do not truly know the impact it can have, how it should be delivered and its potential, how can you adequately plan the outcomes of the work? With this, many leaders do not sign off on the implementation of continuous improvement in their companies because they simply do not understand (often because of the one pitching the work) the return on investment of this endeavour.

4. Rewriting the rules.

There are tried and tested methods and approaches in place that have worked for organizations of all sizes, types and in all industries – do not try and rewrite these. These methods can be tailored, they are flexible, and they can be combined with others depending on needs and expectations, but trying to rewrite the rules of this game simply will not work. Seeing first-hand individuals with no real knowledge of continuous improvement methodologies try to rewrite them, in their own image, was truly eye-opening. The impact of what was delivered was extremely negative, time-consuming and no good came from this.

5. Being too top-down.

You need to ensure you get buy-in for the approach across the board, not just at the leadership level. In my experience, those organizations that deliver top-down approaches to continuous improvement rarely succeed. This is because they don’t garner the support of those at the coalface of the work, they don’t truly understand the issues plaguing processes and they often don’t understand the impact the work they are imposing on others will have. This can lead to complaints about lack of transparency, lack of interest in resourcing issues and lack of engagement and involvement across the board.

6. Not anticipating the knock-on.

A big problem faced when people don’t deploy continuous improvement as they should is siloed working. This is where people change aspects of a process, often theirs, without considering the knock-on impact this could have on processes further down the line or, indeed, the wider business. If changing a process in a silo, you could impact a team further down the line that was unaware of this, sometimes to some big consequences (such as a CEO not getting their bonus kind of consequences, as I witnessed first-hand). With that in mind, continuous improvement should not be done in silo – you must anticipate the knock-on.

Examples of continuous improvement

When it comes to demonstrating continuous improvement, a whole article (or 10) could be written on that. There are so many examples, from across a range of industries based on a series of challenges being addressed. However, there are certain buckets which these improvements regularly fall into, and some could be seen as motivations to conduct continuous improvement in the first place. 5 general examples of continuous improvement could include:

Process improvement:

With process improvement, you focus completely on analysing, reforming and improving a process, always with the aim of having a product or service delivered faster or with better quality. When it comes to delivering this approach through the continuous lens, there are a number of reasons to pursue this approach: Improved outputs, improved performance, increased capacity, increased capability, reduced time waste, reduced financial waste, removing handoffs and removing risk.

Improvement of teams:

Another focus of continuous improvement can be to improve teams, continually. Our people are what make up our organizations, so investing in them on a continuous basis makes perfect sense. The way in which you can do this from a continuous improvement standpoint does not always need to be expensive, indeed many options are very cost-effective. How do we improve our teams on a continuous basis? Ways include: Upskilling them in CI tools and approaches (minimal cost), embedding a continuous improvement mindset into the teams (minimal cost), keeping a live skills matrix document (no cost), filling gaps in your current team set-up (some potential costs) and funding formal qualifications (there is a cost here). By improving your teams continuously, you don’t only improve the skills on offer to move your organization forward, you increase employee happiness, engagement and retention – all great outcomes from a continuous improvement basis.

Improvement of outputs:

A focus of your continuous efforts could be the outputs of your processes. You can clearly state that you want a product to improve quality by X amount, or you want a specific service to be delivered 20% faster than it currently is. This helps focus the mind and the efforts of the continuous improvement approach, because you may not achieve those goals during the first iteration of the work you conduct, therefore you improve again and again to get there. With this approach, you can think about improving the way in which your outputs are delivered (process), focus on the issues plaguing your outputs and working backwards to address and fix them, understand what your customers want and give them that, increasing the volume of your outputs to meeting demands and improving overall quality.

Reduce time taken to do business:

One of the biggest reasons for a continuous improvement approach is time – saving time, reducing the time taken to complete an activity and reinvesting that time elsewhere. Time, like our people, is the most precious thing a business can hold, and saving it, growing it and investing it into the value-adding areas of the business is critical. When it comes to this approach, you can deliver continuous improvement to ensure: that it takes less time to deliver the agreed outputs, you can remove people/handoffs from the process, processes are as streamlined as possible, technology infuses seamlessly with the process and team, each step takes a little less time each time and the product gets to market quicker.

Reducing the cost of doing business:

As well as saving time, continuous improvement can be deployed to save money. This will often be completed on a long-term footing, with continuous improvements again and again in different parts of the business, process or team to save money incrementally. This approach can put your finances on a stable and sustainable footing and helps reduce risk vastly by avoiding any cliff-edge decisions to save big amounts of money today, but not thinking through the consequences of such decisions. With this approach, you can deliver continuous improvement to ensure: a lower cost of doing business, better contract negotiations (lower longer-term costs) less staff being required / less hiring, reduced use of contractors, better quality equipment (less costs to fix) and more money to reinvest back into staff and automation.

Additional examples of continuous improvement exist including building in control measures to an operation, the delivery of improvement projects on a rolling basis, improving the physical and digital working environment, reviewing and embedding SLAs & KPIs into the business, improving data availability and quality, embedding a cultural change or improving customer and employee satisfaction.

Want To Become a Certified Expert on Business Costs Reduction? We have the perfect course for you!

Let’s Recap

Conclusion

Continuous improvement is a powerful one, deployed to save time and money, improve quality and satisfaction, and shift mindsets and approaches. If you follow a continuous improvement process successfully, you’ll reap significant rewards for your business.

Click Here to Read Continuous Improvement Process Part 2