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Many organizations track their key performance indicators (KPIs) using a balanced scorecard approach. The collected feedback gives high-level leaders a way of monitoring the total health of an organization on a regular basis.

Hoshin Kanri is a collaborative approach to driving toward long-term strategic goals in concert with completing the day-to-day work of the organization and achieving tactical objectives. "Catchball" describes the back-and-forth, up-and-down processes for sharing information, getting feedback, and building consensus that are used on an ongoing basis.

The first thing to realize when looking for a continuous improvement model is that it is not just a collection of tools or a specific named and highly touted program that excludes other valuable methodologies. A continuous improvement model includes a mindset and approach that engages workers in understanding their customers and their processes and driving efforts toward sustainable changes for the better.

Do you remember Aesop’s story of the tortoise and the hare? The tortoise plods along slowly and steadily while the hare has an exciting start, racing off toward the finish line. Then the hare stops to rest, burns out, or hits some kind of obstacle. Meanwhile the slow and steady tortoise keeps chugging along and wins.

The road toward impactful, sustainable continuous improvement (CI) for most organizations will almost certainly contain potholes, roadblocks, and other hazards, which is why it’s crucial to take a thoughtful approach to how you introduce and deploy CI through the organization.  In our experience working with dozens of companies across multiple industries, we’ve gleaned a few insights into what separates organizations who “get it right” when it comes to CI from those who struggle to gain traction and make meaningful change.

The United States men's and women's track and field teams are generally considered to be among the best in the world.  Some of the greatest Olympians of all time are US track athletes, including Jim Thorpe, Jesse Owens, Jackie Joyner Kersee, Florence Griffith Joyner, and Carl Lewis.  

So it was no surprise heading into the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing that both the US men's and women's track and field squads were expected to perform well. But things didn't exactly go according to expectations that year. And in order for this year's Rio competitors to prevent history from repeating itself, there are some lessons to take away from those that came before them.

In Part 1 of this series, I described the pros and cons of the Brute Force Model as one approach to deploying continuous improvement, with a particular focus on the dreaded “ROI Lag”.  Part 2 addressed the Incremental Model, which avoids many of the risks and challenges of the Brute Force Model, but is also highly unlikely to deliver a sustainable competitive advantage.  Here in Part 3 I’d like to propose a different-in-kind CI deployment model, one that bridges the tension that exists between the Brute Force Model, designed to drive rapid improvement but not without significant investment and organizational disruption, and the Incremental Model, which contains the investment but also places a ceiling on overall business impact.  We refer to this new approach as the Rapid, Scalable Model for deployment 

I live in a state that requires emissions inspections on all automobiles every 2 years.  Every time I get the reminder letter in the mail, my gut reaction is exasperation because I know that I’m going to have to take time out of my schedule to drive to the emissions station (which is never open at convenient hours), wait in a line of cars for 20-40 minutes, and pay my hard earned money to the state for them to perform the inspection and certify that my car meets the state’s emissions standards.  My reaction has nothing to do with my personal feelings on pollution or environmental care, mind you, and everything to do with my sense of frustration at the disruption that complying with the state’s emissions standards poses on my life.

My experience working in manufacturing is quite similar in many ways.  Certainly all manufacturers have to comply with a set of standards, whether imposed by a governmental organization such as OSHA, an international body of experts, such as ISO or the BRC, or internally developed by your company’s own subject-matter experts.  And I think it’s fair to say that many employees perceive compliance with these standards to be a hassle.  Take OSHA compliance for example.  I’ve never spoken to a single employee at a plant site who did not believe in the importance of workplace safety, but I’ve spoken to many who roll their eyes at the idea that they need to repeat the same safety training courses year after year.

The purpose of this article is certainly not to criticize any organization or governing body that issues these sorts of standards or suggest that companies should not take compliance seriously.  What I’m trying to point out is that something needs to be done to change employee mindsets such that they don’t see compliance to standards as a bad thing but as one mechanism for improving the overall performance of the operation.  Here are two recommendations.

As with any other planned program or function in your business, your investments in continuous improvement (CI) should be included in your operating budget. However, it can be difficult to properly budget for CI investments if you don’t have visibility into the current status of CI across the organization, which is often the case for companies that are using a piecemeal approach to CI management through some combination of Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint slides, and a file management system such as Sharepoint. A platform solution to CI management will provide the visibility required to make appropriate investment decisions.  In our experience, organizations should take into account the following when budgeting for CI.

Continuous improvement (CI) is a perpetual process (as the name indicates) that should be integrated into your company's daily workflow. Every employee should have a clear understanding of their improvement actions, how to achieve them, and the expected completion date. The organization also needs a system for tracking progress and measuring success.

The path of continuous improvement can be long and difficult, especially if it’s just one of many important efforts your organization is pursuing. Often staffers and even internal operational excellence practitioners don’t have the time to sit back and evaluate whether they’re even on the right path.

Each year we hold hundreds of amazing conversations with Decision Makers, Key Influencers, and Thought Leaders in the business improvement space, and like most companies, we take every interaction with clients and prospective clients as an opportunity to learn and improve.  One area where we will continue to evolve is in helping clients to successfully embed EON’s valuable tools and features into their normal workflow.

At EON, the key insight that has driven the vision and strategic direction of our business for the past several years is this…the most important determinant of success when it comes to the broad-based deployment of a continuous improvement (CI) program is the effectiveness of the organization’s continuous improvement management model.  Before I go further, let me provide our working definition for a CI management model:

We EON often stress the importance of taking a so-called “comprehensive approach” to continuous improvement, which means addressing four major CI work streams that need to function in a highly integrated fashion to ensure that CI both serves the needs of, and generates value for, the business.  Those work streams include:

1. Strategy deployment
2. Improvement project execution
3. Best practices implementation
4. Performance analytics

The next four articles in the CI Management series will tackle each of these workstreams in the order shown above starting with strategy deployment.  This article will focus less on the specifics of how to do strategy deployment (which is a topic that has been written on extensively) and more on describing two common mistakes many organizations make and how to avoid them.

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying, “A craftsman never blames his tools.”  It’s one that’s often repeated in circumstances where a person is projecting blame for a problem that he/she actually caused.  And there’s no doubt in my mind that there is significant truth in this adage (I’ve messed up more than one home repair project in which I wanted to blame the tools).  However, like many aphorisms that get thrown about nowadays, it’s likely to be misapplied on many occasions because the truth is there are occasions where the tool is actually the problem.

This blog post is part one of a three-part series.

Last week I had the privilege of speaking to a group of Continuous Improvement and Operations Leaders at the Generis American Manufacturing Summit in Chicago.  The topic was “How to Ensure ROI from Your Continuous Improvement Approach,” which is one that I’ve written about previously but had not delivered to a live audience until last week.

EON's goal any time that we interject our experience and insights into the larger discussion of all things continuous improvement related is to sincerely attempt to provide a unique perspective or otherwise get folks thinking about these issues differently.  One way that we did that at last week’s conference was to share our view on how to manage the investment in a broad-based deployment without sacrificing on deployment pace or quality of outcomes.  The next three blog posts (including this one) are dedicated to articulating that view by looking at two “traditional” CI deployment models and then comparing them to a third model that we believe offers the best of all worlds so to speak.