When it comes to optimizing your processes, it's essential to prioritize the needs of your customers. This means taking into account the effect of any changes you make on the customer experience. At ClearPoint, we identified the RFP (request for proposal) process as a great candidate for improvement. Process improvement can boost equipment productivity and reduce inefficiencies.
Before you can take steps to improve processes, you must first define a measurable goal or a set of results that you are aiming for. Continuous improvement helps your team adjust when external conditions change, and if your team is focused on improving quality, consider how that process change can influence the way end users experience your product. Tracking data points such as time, production and ROI will help you determine if the improvements you make are effective. Edwards Deming extended Shewhart's idea and used the scientific method to improve processes in addition to quality control.
Kaizen is renowned for its team approach, in which all members of the organization share ideas and work together to keep improving every area of the company. This data can help identify where inefficiencies may exist and where to focus improvement initiatives. Optimization involves going backwards in the process improvement exercise, but subsequent iterations should progress quickly. Even after extensive testing, process improvements require daily monitoring during the first few weeks of implementation to detect any issues that were overlooked during the testing phase.
When working with stakeholders in processes like this, it's important to identify problems and create next steps together so that production can be improved. The methodology you choose will depend on why you want to improve your processes and what you want to improve. It's important to remember that process improvement is an ongoing effort that requires dedication and commitment from all members of your team. By tracking data points and collaborating with stakeholders, you can ensure that your processes are running as efficiently as possible.
