Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1323994
JANUARY 2021 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 25 These methods can, and do, scale down. Inspiration can be found in Millard's comment that "to achieve real improvement, the impact of change must be measured. This makes it possible to determine if the change can be applied successfully to other problems." [10] Perhaps it is enough to be accountable to one- self? Measure the improvement by posting metrics at your workspace, or on the machin- ery, where others might notice. Regardless of the scale, Millard counsels, "Proving positive ROI also helps keep the organization aligned around improvement." Do You Share Knowledge? At this point, problems are being identified and measurement of baseline and attempted improvements are in process. Sharing results more widely is the next step toward contin- uous improvement. When tackling continu- ous improvement on a larger scale, Dewar, Doucette and Epstein share that it is "critical to scale best practices across (and up and down) organizations." They point out, "One of our clients became adept at deploying small cross- functional teams against any problem to break down the organizational silos that had previ- ously prevented knowledge sharing." Remember, the change need not be dra- matic. Small improvements in highly repetitive work tasks accumulate into significant gains over time. This is a key point: to get knowledge shar- ing to be effective, create teams with represen- tatives from all affected departments. It's the involvement of the upstream, downstream, and administrative teams as well that help make a change effective and improve the per- manence of the solution. Do You Have Employee Involvement? Employee involvement is a key factor. The stories are that Deming required his continu- ous improvement training to start at the top and be taught down the organizational chart by the managers themselves. This method certainly assures that the methods being taught come with an automatic approval from higher up. Yet it's the staff at the "action end" of the organizational chart who can be expected to have the most practical insight. In fact, Dewar and team disclose, "Frontline employees are closest to the work, and thus typically have the richest insights on how their work can be done better. Capturing their per- spectives is critical." Millard concurs, "The continuous improve- ment model relies greatly on employees, not only top management, to identify opportuni- ties for improvement. This bottom-up improve- ment is effective because employees are clos- est to the problems, and thus better equipped to solve them." And then, Millard rings the "X=X c – 1" bell by suggesting, "Ask people what improvement they could make that would save them 5 min- utes a day. Then empower them to implement that improvement, and spread it to everyone else in the organization doing the same pro- cess. In this way, you can take a small idea that anyone could come up with and drive a big impact." Benefits Techniques for implementing continuous improvement strategies are well documented elsewhere; expect that we will visit some of these sources throughout the year. In the meantime, "X=X c – 1" opportunities come at all levels of the organization and fall into some common categories. Continuous improvement benefits can be categorized as follows.