The biggest enemy of improvement is accepting the status quo.
Unfortunately I see it all the time in print on demand. Rather than creating a culture of “continuous improvement” sites become conditioned to the normal, things like – a particular workflow has an accepted failure rate, 12% of production always goes missing at peak, the 2nd shift is 9% less productive than the first shift.
If you want to get better, stats like these have to be owned and confronted.
I know how hard it is to find the time to focus on improvement when you are under daily production pressure, but there is one, very important, reason to focus on continuous improvement.
——- If you don’t make the time to improve now, you miss out on all the future years of booking those savings to your bottom line. ——-
To me continuous improvement often fails to be converted to action because you don’t know where to start. Finding a solution starts with diagnostics.
So my advice is:
- Start by listing your key metrics
- Consider which of these could be done better
- Put in place a measurement system that lets you see the actions that are creating the outcome
By measuring you achieve insight. With insight you can see what are the alternatives for action.
Then outcomes become possible.
You don’t have to do this on your own, when you’re ready we have a team that can help.
