5 Continuous Improvement Ideas to Try Out

Maybe you don’t have buy-in from Executive leadership for a Lean transformation or maybe you do. You know your organization can fall behind the competition if you aren’t actively looking for ways to streamline and improve processes. One way you can combat this is by implementing continuous improvement or Kaizen. If you’re looking for ways to create a better organization, I’ve listed some continuous improvement ideas to try out.

1. Training & Development

If there’s one thing you should have for continuous improvement, it’s training and development. Training programs are one of the improvement tools that can give your employees more opportunities for development, growth, and engagement. It also provides an avenue to train them with the skills and knowledge your organization needs its workforce to have. For example, you can train them about process improvement training or business approaches like the Six Sigma and Lean to secure customer satisfaction and cost reduction. You can also take advantage of this program to teach them the best business practices to better execute current strategies and find ways to improve on them.

2. Daily Huddles

Daily huddles take place at the value stream level and last for about 10 to 15 minutes. Huddles are led by the leader and are attended by all members of the value stream. Huddles take place directly in front of the visual board so that the metrics that are displayed on the board can be discussed and updated as needed.

The purpose of daily huddle is to make everyone collaborate at a common platform, take charge and ownership of each and every aspect, for example, improving production, productivity, material availability, etc., and most important is the increasing communication.

3. Standard Work

Standard work is a written description of how a process should be done. It guides consistent execution. At its best, it documents a current “best practice” and ensures that it is implemented throughout a company. At a minimum, it provides a baseline from which a better approach can be developed.

The definition of standard work is “the most effective combination of manpower, materials and machinery”. Standard work is the method, and thereby you have the four Ms of manufacturing (manpower, material, machinery, methods). Standard Work is only “the most effective” until the standard is improved.

4. Value Stream Mapping

Value stream mapping is a tremendously valuable tool for improving a process. Well suited for a broad range of industries and processes. A value stream map (VSM) illustrates the flow of materials and information as a product or service moves through a process.

Value-stream mapping is a useful tool for grasping the current situation and for planning improvements. A current state value-stream map depicts the current situation as is. A future state value-stream map depicts what the value stream should look like after planned improvements have been implemented.

Kaizen is a Lean manufacturing tool that improves quality, productivity, safety, and workplace culture. Kaizen focuses on applying small, daily changes that result in major improvements over time. Although improvements under Kaizen are small and incremental, the process brings about dramatic results over time.

5. Hold a Kaizen

Beyond the obvious benefit of improving processes, holding a Kaizen event can foster problem-solving, collaboration, and communication skills and allow employees to demonstrate leadership. Engaging team members to identify problems and suggest improvements in their work areas encourages a sense of ownership over their work, which can improve overall motivation, morale, and productivity. Finally, holding a Kaizen event is one way to reinforce a robust culture of continuous improvement within your organization, after all, the best way to sustain the principles that you want to guide your company is to put them into practice.

You can try one of these or all of these. You’ll see benefits from these continuous improvement ideas and perhaps even spark a Lean transformation with your success.

Effective Meetings Should Have a PAIR

If I told you that only 50% of meeting time is used effectively, would you believe me? (Don’t answer. I can hear you nodding from here.) There’s evidence that virtual meetings score even lower. And not only are pointless meetings annoying, but they are also a drain on your revenue: two hours per week spent in pointless meetings results in a waste of more than $541 billion in employee time.

It’s important to distinguish between effective and efficient meetings.

An efficient meeting starts promptly, stays on track due to good time management, includes as few people as possible, and achieves the stated objective.

Efficiency is a superficial quality. It says nothing about whether the right people were included for the right reasons, or whether the meeting generated any value.

An effective meeting brings a thoughtfully selected group of people together for a specific purpose, provides a forum for open discussion, and delivers a tangible result: a decision, a plan, a list of great ideas to pursue, a shared understanding of the work ahead. Not only that but the result is then shared with others whose work may be affected.

A simple acronym I learned will help us in this regard. Just remember that every meeting should have a PAIR.

PAIR stands for ‘Purpose And Intended Result’

The purpose of a meeting should be clear and stated before it is even called. It should be stated even before the agenda is agreed.

The purpose could be simple, like ‘To discuss the upcoming quarterly campaign’ or ‘To introduce our new CRM system to the sales team’.

Make sure the purpose is clearly stated, so everyone can assess its relevance to them and the time it’s going to take. Make the purpose attractive and inspirational if possible. People can see the purpose and identify whether it’s worth their time and energy attending.

The next part (Intended Result) is just as vital. We say ‘intended’ because it’s possible that the meeting’s overall result could be determined by the discussions carried out and may change during the meeting itself.

Examples of intended results could be: ‘To allocate responsibilities to each team member for the campaign’ or ‘To get buy in from every team member for the CRM system’

You may only have one purpose for the meeting (the ‘why’ it’s being held) but you may have more than one intended result (the ‘what’ you will achieve).

Attendees should be sent the PAIR for the meeting before being invited, so they know what their responsibilities are during and after the meeting. If their time is limited, they may be able to attend for just a section of it that discussed their specific agenda items.

A PAIR also allows you to determine the success of any meeting you may attend. If the intended result is achieved, it’s been a good use of time. If not, it can be re-assessed and determined if changes need to be made for future meetings.

So, ensure that every meeting you run has its PAIR before you invite others. And make sure that you know the PAIR for every meeting you attend.

6 Steps for Benchmarking Best Practices

In Lean improvement, benchmarking is the regular, systematic measuring of an organization’s own products, services or processes against those of the recognized best practitioners in the world. The information collected about a company’s own processes analyzed in relationship to the best-in-class practices provides insight into the actions the company can take to improve its performance. Indeed, benchmarking analysis can even provide metrics by which an organization can measure its success in adding value to its business and work processes.

The key steps involved with benchmarking include:

Measure current practices: Teams determine an area where the company is underperforming. They then measure key performance indicators to see where they currently stand.

Research best practices: After measuring their own performance, businesses then measure those same key metrics in whatever operation or process they want to improve. Understand how your process work and how other group’s processes work.

Analyze best practices: Teams analyze how companies achieve a high standard in the key metrics. This often requires touring the world-class organization’s operations or meeting with people from the organization. Collection information and data to evaluate and compare.

Compare performance: Teams then compare their operations with those of the world-class organization, finding areas where they can make improvements. These changes will help them achieve a higher standard in the key performance metrics.

Model best practices: Teams make significant changes to improve current practices from what they learned. The project team’s next step is to set goals for the improvement of the company’s existing process. These goals can, and probably should, be stretch goals that will result in a process even better than the other organization’s best-in-class process.

Repeat

While benchmarking is not a perfect process if done properly and consistently it can be the start of improving your business and creating a more optimal learning environment.

One of the biggest advantages of benchmarking is the extent of improvements the organization makes by learning from the processes of others. A better and proven process can be adapted, with suitable modifications for company requirements, with less time invested for inventing new methodologies. Benchmarking also uncovers new ways of improving a company’s own processes by motivating actions learned from studying and experiencing those organizations with best-in-class processes.

Benchmark Your Leadership Skills

Every person has a unique DNA that guides his or her natural behavioral (personality) strengths and struggles—yes, everyone has both strengths and struggles. This knowledge is grounded in science (i.e., it’s measurable and predictable, not just “touchy feely”), but the application requires awareness and flexibility to adjust your leadership and management to fit the talents and experience of the individual.

The most effective leaders regularly audit their own leadership skills and competencies to see where the gaps are.

 

With this Leadership Assessment Test you can benchmark yourself against 96 different skills across 12 leadership competencies.  

 

Over 20,000 leaders worldwide have taken the assessment and it receives rave reviews. Your personalized report will highlight your strengths and areas of development plus tips on how to improve your scores for next time.

The first step to becoming an effective leader is to understand your current strengths and weaknesses when it comes to leadership. This leadership self-assessment will help you understand how you stack up as a leader and what opportunities there are for you to improve your leadership effectiveness.

Yokoten, Learning From Others’ Experience

Knowledge is the single biggest asset of any organization. Successful organizations have realized and maintained knowledge sharing as a key part of their business. The very reason an employee is hired is because of their knowledge and expertise in a given field and how they can use that knowledge in taking the company to the next level. 

There are many benefits for a knowledge sharing organization: 

• Best practices developed in one part of the organization are accepted in another part 
• New information is not lost or overlooked because people can translate it to knowledge and pass it on 
• Knowledge is about knowing both the why and the how, and when you have both you can continuously improve current standards, faster than competitors  
• Accelerates the process of moving to the next target, continuously improving business processes  
• Stimulates innovation 

While knowledge plays a crucial role in an organization’s success, not many efforts are put in sharing, managing, and preserving it. At Toyota a key aspect of helping knowledge sharing permeate their business is “Yokoten.” 

Yokoten is a Japanese term that can be roughly translated as "across everywhere." In the Japanese lean system, it is used to mean "best practice sharing." Yokoten, the term Toyota adopted to capture the idea of horizontal transfer of information and knowledge across an organization. Yokoten is more peer-to-peer, with the expectation that people go see for themselves and learn how another area improved or solved a problem.  

Inside of organizations, there is so much untapped knowledge. To combat this, over the past two decades, companies have invested millions of dollars in knowledge management systems. The objective has been to capture the company’s knowledge. Yokoten is a form of knowledge management. It encompasses the methods of documenting and distributing knowledge about what works and what doesn't. As a knowledge management device, Yokoten makes knowledge organizational, not individual. Yokoten is a two-way street, requiring proactive effort from both those acquiring and developing the knowledge and those who could benefit from greater understanding of the requirements for success. 

If others are doing well, people tend to be interested in what they are doing and how they're doing it, so that they, too, can be successful. Sharing best practices is a key part attributing to the success of any organization. Similar to the old saying, "Learn from other's mistakes," it's important to learn from individual experiences, but it's much easier and more effective to learn from the experiences, mistakes and successes of others. 

Much of best practice knowledge is tacit - held in people's heads and not always easy to document. Therefore, most best practice programs combine two key elements: explicit knowledge such as a best practices database (connecting people with information), and methods for sharing tacit knowledge such as communities of practice (connecting people with people). Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. These two approaches are complementary. A database can provide enough information for a potential user of the best practice to find it and decide if it is worth pursuing further. However, the best way of sharing best practices is 'on the job' and so communities and personal contact with others who have used the best practice is key. 

Yokoten is an essential part of long-term success in a lean culture but can also have a big impact on short-term results. Yokoten is a success multiplier. Senior leaders must actively go see, recognize good work and require others to go see. Management must organize presentations of successful kaizen projects and invite colleagues to attend and learn. Team and department leaders must actively engage members in studying kaizen examples, motivating them to start kaizen on their own. Project leaders and continuous improvement professionals must put Yokoten on their checklists and follow up rigorously. 

Regardless of your path on the Lean journey, focusing on the accumulation and transfer of knowledge and learnings as embodied in the concept of Yokoten can have a tremendous impact on the overall results and success of the Lean programs. 

10 Lean Blogs to Follow

A key part of Lean (or continuous improvement) is continuous education – learning new ideas to challenge your thinking. The Lean community of thinkers is a generous one that believes in paying it forward. Many share their knowledge and experience in blogs they write. Reading these Lean blogs can keep Lean principles and practices at the forefront of your mind as you make decisions in work and in life.

Here’s a list of ten Lean blogs you should follow, in no particular order…

1) Old Lean Dude – by Bruce Hamilton

Location: Massachusetts

About: Bruce has been around the Lean scene since 1985, first as a practitioner and later as a consultant. He is passionate about learning and shares all his thoughts and learned lessons on his blog. As he says “Everyday there is something new to learn and to share.” His blog is an ongoing reflection on Lean philosophy and practices with an emphasis on keeping good jobs close to home.

Frequency: 1 post / week

 

2) Lean Pathways – by Pascal Dennis and Al Norval

Location: Toronto, CA

About: In this outstanding Lean blog, you can enjoy insightful articles, find interesting facts and curious points of view. The author often presents commonly accepted norms and theories related to Lean but from a different angle. Pascal Dennis is a professional engineer, advisor and author of several books. He has a solid background with Lean and has supported lean implementation at leading international companies from different industries.

Frequency: 1 post / week

 

3) Bobemiliani.com – by Bob Emiliani

Location: Providence, Rhode Island

About: Bob Emiliani is a professor of Lean management at Central Connecticut State University. He is an author of 17 books and 47 research papers based on his deep researches in the fields of leadership and management. Prior to his academic career, Dr. Emiliani has 15 years of industry experience and he is more than passionate about Lean management. All this knowledge converts into insightful articles presented in his blog. A gold mine for both, Lean practitioners and Lean enthusiasts.

Frequency: 7 posts / month

 

4) Gemba Academy Blog – by Jon Miller, Ron Periera, Kevin Meyer, Steve Kane

Location: USA

About: Gemba Academy offers online Lean Manufacturing, Lean Office, and Six Sigma training to companies around the world. They teach topics such as 5S, the 7 Wastes, Kanban, Standard Work, Value Stream Mapping, Quick Changeover, and how to leverage these methods in Kaizen Events.

Frequency: 2 posts / week

 

5) Lean Blog – by Mark Graban

Location: Fort Worth, TX

About: Mark started this blog back in 2005. He is a veteran Lean management practitioner in the manufacturing industry and later he decided to dedicate his professional life to incorporating the principles of Lean in the healthcare industry.

Frequency: 1 post / day

 

6) JFlinch Blog – by Jamie Flinchbaugh

Location: Lehigh Valley, PA

About: Jamie Flinchbaugh is a lean advisor, speaker, and author. He has advised over 300 companies around the world in a lean transformation. Previously he co-founded the Lean Learning Center, and he has helped build nearly 20 other companies as either a co-founder, board of directors member, advisor, or angel investor.

Frequency: 3 posts / week

 

7) Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog – by John Hunter

Location: Houston, TX

About: In Curious Cat, John Hunter shares opinions and challenges derived from his professional and personal experience. John is an author, lean management practitioner, software development consultant and much more. Here you can find original commentaries related to different topics such as lean management, management improvement and etc.

Frequency: 3 posts / day

 

8) The Lean Thinker – by Mark Rosenthal

Location: Washington

About: Mark is seasoned in lean manufacturing and has more than 20 years of professional experience. He has helped various organizations to implement and understand continuous improvement. Whether you are a beginner or an advanced professional, in this Lean blog you may find valuable information about broad or more specific topics.Frequency: 1 post / week

 

9) Markovitz Consulting Blog – By Dan Markovitz

Location: California

About: Blog by Dan Markovitz. Founder of Markovitz Consulting helping organizations become faster, stronger, and more agile through the application of lean principles to knowledge work. Our mission is to improve the well-being of individuals, organizations, and the planet through the application of Lean business management practices.

Frequency: 1 post / week

 

10) A Lean Journey – by Tim McMahon

Location: Massachusetts

About: Tim is a Lean implementation leader, author, and blogger. Tim has more than 20 years of leadership experience implementing Lean manufacturing. A proven leader in high tech manufacturing companies, he is passionate about quality improvement methods by actively learning, thinking and engaging people.

Frequency: 3 posts / week

Note: I know this is my own blog, but I am partial to my own labor of love.

The blog landscape has changed a lot over the last decade and likely will continue to evolve. I have chosen to focus on personal blogs here, my preference. Yet, there are many other helpful Lean blogs that are not on this list. Let me know the blogs that you enjoy reading.

Recap From the 15th Annual Northeast Lean Conference - Total Employee Involvement

Learn more about NE Lean Conference below

This past week I was able to spend a wonderful time at the 15^th Annual Northeast Lean Conference. I always look forward to these opportunities to connect with friends, learn best practices from others, and get re-energized around continuous improvement.

The theme of this conference is one that everyone relates to and tries to create in the Lean community “Total Employee Involvement”. I want a share a couple of key takeaways and thoughts from interesting presentations during this conference.

Jamie Bonini from TSSC talked about the lessons learned from 25 years of spreading, teaching, and implementing The Toyota Production System (TPS or Lean) outside of Toyota:

1. Be Clear: TPS is an organizational culture of highly engaged people solving problems to drive performance. The philosophy underlies the technical tools that require the managerial role to build and sustain the TPS culture.
2. Model lines: Learn by doing by building the culture through model lines to 1) develop leaders to then guide spreading where, how, and who and 2) expose real challenges to address in spreading.
3. TPS must be an organization (not operations) strategy with strong leadership.
4. Build a strong, small, full time, internal TPS team to support spreading.
5. Company values must fit the TPS philosophy (the 4 points).
6. TPS is difficult. Expect successes and setbacks. Learn mostly by doing.
7. Stability is a must. If low, build it first and practice problem solving.
8. Main challenge: Building the managerial role, behaviors, and problem solving.

Alan Robinson, UMASS Professor, took on the task of answering whether Lean is still relevant in a post-industrial economy. Lean has made significant contributions in manufacturing, entrepreneurships (The Lean Startup), Software development (Agile), Project management (Scrum), Agriculture (Lean Farm). However, Lean has not readily caught on in Healthcare, Education, Government, Military, and Financial Services. There are a couple reasons for this: 1) Lean pushes us to dramatically raise the quality of our leadership, thinking, problem-solving, and problem-finding 2) It is one thing to know what full-blown lean looks like but completely different to know how to make it happen in ordinary organizations. Shingo Institute reports that less than 4% of CEOs are serious about lean. As leaders we need to understand that we don’t have all the answers, actually, much less than that. Taiichi Ohno said “Even the best managers are wrong 50% of the time.” Shingo tells us the real driver for TPS is made by significant front-line engagement, “The goal of TPS is to unleash mass creativity.” This requires humility from leaders, Lean is not for you if you have to be the smartest person in the room. Most of an organization’s improvement potential lies in front-line ideas. Roughly 80 percent of an organization’s performance improvement potential lies in front-line ideas, and 20 percent in management-driven initiatives. Our mainstream management tools do not allow us to see the waste.

Lean is a proven methodology for striving for operational excellence, but:

As it works on human beings’ weakest points, it will seem hard to do, without a lot of deep education and discipline; and its real power is not unleashed with full involvement of the front-lines, which given our history is perhaps the hardest thing of all to do.

Marianna Magnusdottir, Chief Happiness Officer (great title) at Manino had powerful presentation about the human side of improvement. Companies who are tools focused and not people focused are often fraught with failure. As many of us know successful lean implementations are 80% people development and 20% tools learning. Using the analogy of rowing a boat where one oar is relationships and one is results in the wavy sea of reality. If you focus only on processes and results you can go in circles. If you only focus on people development you too will find yourself rowing in circles. However, if you are rowing both oars (relationships and results) you navigate through the waves (ups and downs) of business and transform your organization. Your daily management process should include elements of process/results and relationships/people. These should be daily communication boards that build trust and mutual respect by getting to know and learning from each other.

I had the chance to talk about using daily management to engage employees in the gemba. Lean organizations make use of Daily Management systems, a structured process to focus employee’s actions to continuously improve their day-to-day work. Daily Management empowers employees to identify potential process concerns, recommend potential solutions, and learn by implementing process changes. Daily Management, if done right, can be a critical tool in any organization’s toolbox to engage frontline staff in problem-solving and to deliver customer value.

Art Smalley ended the conference with a presentation on the 4 Types of Problems, a book he recently wrote. If you’re in business then it is inevitable there are problems that need to be solved. Not all problems are the same and can’t be solved the same old way. He demonstratesdthat most business problems fall into four main categories, each requiring different thought processes, improvement methods, and management cadences:

Type 1: Troubleshooting - A reactive process of rapidly fixing abnormal conditions by returning things to immediately known standards.

Type 2: Gap-from-standard - A structured problem-solving process that aims more at the root cause through problem definition, goal setting, analysis, countermeasure implementation, checks, standards, and follow-up activities.

Type 3: Target-state - Continuous improvement (kaizen) that goes beyond existing levels of performance to achieve new and better standards or conditions.

Type 4: Open-ended and Innovation - Unrestricted pursuit through creativity and synthesis of a vision or ideal condition that entail radical improvements and unexpected products, processes, systems, or value for the customer beyond current levels. 

As Art beautifully said “Not Every Problem Is a “Nail” But Companies Typically Reach for the Same Old “Hammer”.”

There were a number of great presentations from many great practitioners of Lean. I am already looking forward to next year’s conference which will be around the theme “Lean in 21^st Century”.