Are you agree with that? Is it realistic?
I will say I agree, and it is realistic, and this is the basic principle for productivity specialist like me. You have to do improvement continuosly, all the time, it never ended, and most important, not necessary cost so much money. When money take place, then for us, it is not an improvement, investment perhaps. So because improvement play important role for organization to win competition in the market, you need to understand the concept very well. I am very happy to share what I did during 15 years in operation management.
I will say I agree, and it is realistic, and this is the basic principle for productivity specialist like me. You have to do improvement continuosly, all the time, it never ended, and most important, not necessary cost so much money. When money take place, then for us, it is not an improvement, investment perhaps. So because improvement play important role for organization to win competition in the market, you need to understand the concept very well. I am very happy to share what I did during 15 years in operation management.
There are at least 4 approach to do improvement process, they are:
- Set the standard. Improvement is a condition where the recent condition become better than the previous one. It can be the lead time, the cost, the quality, the function, and so on. it can be in your organization, your home, or even your personal life. Therefore, the key word here is the criteria or standard that you can compare and measure. Understanding of the market and your competitor is very important here.
- Set the goals. Once you have the standard or criteria, you need to set the goals, i.e. the condition you want to achieve, the goals must be SMART, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time oriented, otherwise you will get exhaustic before reach your goals. If necessary, you can breakdown your goals into several miles stone to make it easy to achieved, and it depends on your existing system and resources. When it comes into the money, you must ask the question for yourself, is the improvement goals still under the process capability? If the answer NO, then you might need for an investment, but again, before doing that, ask another question, is there a room for improvement with the capability you have now?, if the answer YES, then you re-set your goals of improvement to be on the range of your process capability as maximum as you can achieve.
- Develop the system. Once you have the goals, you need to develop the system and procedure in measuring your day to day achievement. The system make you able to see how far you go in reaching your goals and understand why you can not achieve the target, so you can easily do your evaluation to set the action plan in deal with the situation. You can apply PDCA cycle, i.e. plan-do-check-action. Your knowledge on the resources you have play an important roles here. Alignment of the system you want to develop with the resources you have will determine how much it will cost you.
- Train your people or yourself. People is the center part of the improvement process. You need to prepare your people or even yourself to be able to work with the system in reaching your goals. Improvement is the change process. It requires behaviour change of the people involved in the process. The key is change your people mindset before expect them to change their behaviour, that is why training become very important. Your people must understand the reason why they need to do such a thing, otherwise you will have cat and mouse situation.
Those approach are quite effective and help me doing improvement to not only my organization, but for myself as well with no investment at all. I had help a company to survive and grow from almost bankrupt in 6 months operation only. And I have helped a company with 5 years lost in average 3% to be profitable. It’s all about the process of improvement, and I believe, if it is work for me, it would work well for you.