08/05/2019
The Position of Process Improvement in Your Company: Three Easy (?) Questions…
“Only you can answer them for yourself:
1. Do I view improvement as legitimate work, or as an add-on to my real job?
2. Is improvement a periodic, add-on project (a campaign), or the core activity?
3. Is it acceptable in our company to work on improvement occasionally?”
Interested in Process Improvement as much as we are?
Drop us a line… irrespective of the answers above: we would be happy either learning from you or helping your employees to improve their processes and create an habit.
[Source: Toyota Kata- Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results, by Mike Rother]
25/03/2019
The Role of Continuous Process Improvement
The capability for continuous, incremental evolution and improvement represents perhaps the best assurance of durable competitive advantage and company survival.
Why?
1. Small, incremental steps let us learn along the way, make adjustments, and discover the path to where we want to be
2. Relying on technical innovation alone often provides only temporary competitive advantage
3. Cost and quality competitiveness tend to result from accumulation of many small steps over time
4. Relying on periodic improvements and innovations alone conceals a system that is static and vulnerable
5. We cannot leave a process alone and expect high quality, low cost and stability.
[Source: Toyota Kata- Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results, by Mike Rother]
04/02/2019
Symptoms of a Broken Process
In his book about Process Improvement*, Dan Madison describes 15 symptoms of a broken process. On top of the list is the one related to customers:
"Customers (either internal or external) are unhappy."
The most frequent symptoms that I have met while managing people and processes in large corporations were:
1. Managers spend a great deal of time "firefighting."
2. Complexity, exceptions, and special cases are common.
3. Established procedures are circumvented to expedite work.
[*Source: Process Mapping, Process Improvement and Process Management, by Dan Madison]
23/01/2019
Out of the four elements of an organization - people, processes, controls and structure - most of the issues and problems are generated by processes. Processes are groups of activities that (should) lead to a clear result or output.
If you know that some processes in your company must be improved, drop us a line and let's discuss how we can help.
