By Felix C. Veroya
I was invited by a multinational semiconductor company for the second time around, to be one of their judges in their Continuous Improvement (CI) Convention. The convention showcases completed CI projects by its employees and their subcontractors. The winning team will compete for the Asia round of the same competition as well as cash prizes, too. I really admire companies who allot resources to employee engagements like this. This is a win–win program allowing employees to use their knowledge, skills, and abilities to produce significant improvement projects while at the same time creating value for the company.
As the winners take the stage for the awarding, judges were asked to give a short message about Continuous Improvement, and I want to share what I told the audience on how to make CI work effectively and sustainably.
- Make sure that the identified gap is aligned with the strategic objectives. There are a lot of gaps – problems or opportunities – that can be found inside an organization. To make the CI initiatives significant, CI practitioners must ensure that the gaps they decided to pursue are worth the resources by checking their alignment to what the organization wants to achieve. In this way, value can be created, and resources can be optimized wisely.
- Challenge the reliability and validity of data. Data is a critical component of making CI initiatives successful. In this data age, decision-making becomes way more effective with the utilization of data. Having data to infer is not enough, the source of course should be reliable and valid to avoid decision errors that can cost the organization to bleed money. As the old saying goes, “Garbage in, garbage out.”. You do not want to just arrive at decisions, but at the right ones using the right data.
- Validate using data. As referred to in the previous item, data plays a critical role in CI initiatives. Potential root causes or hypotheses about factors affecting our processes are validated using data. Observations and other qualitative tools and techniques are effective but with quantitative approaches, we can harness gains far more significant. Data–based decision-making is not just a trend nowadays but a necessity if you really want to achieve success for your CI initiatives.
- Assess risks before implementing changes. Thinking of solutions that will address validated root causes of the gap is easy, what is more, difficult is to make the change happen. As practitioners get too excited to implement these changes, they forget to assess the risks associated with these actions. Instead of getting favorable results, they ended up having nightmares of the consequences of rushing into implementation. Remember, for every change that will be made, there will be equivalent risks, and these should be identified, analyzed, and addressed prior to implementing the identified improvements. You do CI initiatives to save resources and not to consume them to address the adverse effects of risks that were not recognized.
- Sustainability of implemented actions is essential. Deploying improvements is not the end goal of CI initiatives. The goal is to make sure that the gains you created from the improvements will be sustained in the process. This is where control measures or mechanisms that will make the improvements stick to the process will come into the picture. As a guide, we can ask the question, “How can I ensure that the problem will not recur in this process”. We are not after a short-term feast but on long-lasting celebrations.
These are things that I have learned in the past 11 years of practicing CI and helping organizations build their system for it. Hope this made sense to you as you may want to establish, improve or calibrate your CI support system in your organizations.
Let’s continue to be #significantlybetter continuous improvement practitioners, together!
Do you want to talk? Get in touch with me thru fcveroya@asklexph.com.