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JANUARY 2021 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 27 These methods can, and do, scale down. In- spiration can be found in Millard's comment that "to achieve real improvement, the im- pact 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 attempt- ed improvements are in process. Sharing re- sults more widely is the next step toward con- tinuous improvement. When tackling contin- uous 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 dramat- ic. Small improvements in highly repetitive work tasks accumulate into significant gains over time. This is a key point: to get knowledge sharing to be effective, create teams with representa- tives from all affected departments. It's the in- volvement of the upstream, downstream, and administrative teams as well that help make a change effective and improve the permanence 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 expect- ed to have the most practical insight. In fact, Dewar and team disclose, "Frontline employ- ees are closest to the work, and thus typical- ly have the richest insights on how their work can be done better. Capturing their perspec- tives 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 document- ed 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.