Continuous improvement is sometimes referred to as the PDCA cycle, which stands for Plan-Do-Check-Act. And those are the four stages of continuous improvement. When employees feel that they are part of a process of continuous improvement, they commit more and invest more in the company's success. Knowing the key methods of continuous improvement can ensure that companies know what strategies will produce the results they seek.
The main idea behind continuous improvement is that no process is perfect and there is always room for improvement. Think about processes that have a major impact on your line of business; processes that are directly related to your organization's sources of income or those that have a direct or indirect impact on your customers; processes that, once improved, will arouse the interest of managers and executives alike. As improvements are made, management must update metrics and inspect what should happen as the improvement occurs. Many organizations assume that the work of mapping the capacity of processes has already been done, without realizing that their processes are underperforming because they have never been tested or optimized to determine their capacity.
By ensuring that leaders and supervisors are present and engaged beyond the special improvement project, employees realize that their leaders participate and invest in daily operations and are aware that the changes they make are important. Since the process you've chosen will have to go through a few iterations before it really becomes “agile”, try to keep it simple in the first phase. As Glenn Rogers, CEO of Float, explains to his team: “Look for continuous improvement by welcoming feedback rather than defending against it. In most use cases, Check is synonymous with inspection activities, which sometimes leads to inspecting more than 100 percent of the products and a clear verification of the processes.
However, as the situation and requirements evolve to meet customer needs, the E3P3 can replace the PDCA approach in all improvement projects, from manufacturing to service industries. Any content you consume can introduce you to new concepts and open up opportunities to renew processes. To act proactively, any organization's business processes must be evaluated on a regular basis to find out exactly where the process is located. Continuous improvement helps you create a system that makes it easy to test new ideas and implement changes quickly.
With continuous customer demand on the one hand and continuous customer needs on the other, methods such as Lean Six Sigma play an important role, as they continuously improve all commercial processes and products.
