What level of impact can continuous improvement achieve? One of our clients would say ten weeks. That’s how much time they were able to save in their product testing process—cutting the time by more than 80%—through a large amount of small changes to how its engineering and testing teams collaborated.
What is continuous improvement?
Continuous improvement is an ongoing effort to improve all elements of an organization—processes, tools, products, services, etc. Sometimes those improvements are big, often they are small. But what’s most important is they’re frequent. Companies that excel at continuous improvement start with the belief that success comes from innovating “how” they do what they do, engaging all employees in sharing knowledge and generating improvement ideas, and exploring better ways to deliver to customers and respond to changes in the external environment.
What does continuous improvement look like in action?
Fostering a continuous improvement culture is rooted in three practices:
Performance transparency
- Making goals public and cascading them across the organization
- Tracking progress transparently
- Giving frontline and management clear visibility into performance
- Example: One industrial client achieved 20% productivity increase in less than two months through better asset utilization tracking
Knowledge sharing
- Deploying cross-functional teams against problems
- Breaking down organizational silos
- Promoting informal and formal knowledge sharing
- Achieving 80%+ cycle time improvements through collaborative sprints
Employee involvement
- Capturing frontline employee insights
- Empowering managers to lead changes
- Developing focused interventions based on employee feedback
- Expanding opportunities for mobility and leadership development
Transformational results
Core to a continuous improvement mindset is the belief that a steady stream of improvements, diligently executed, will have transformational results. Continuous improvement has helped clients across industries provide greater value to their customers.
