Continuous Improvement

Continuous Improvement (CI) is an ongoing effort to improve products, services or processes over time or all at once. It is also the never-ending effort to find and eliminate root causes of problems. CI is a philosophy used by the Japanese which focuses on improving all factors related to the transformation process on an ongoing basis. In order for this philosophy to be successful it will take a total effort from an entire organization to locate and eliminate problems. The Japanese word for continuous improvement is kaizen, which came from the Japanese character kai, meaning change, and the character zen, meaning good. Kaizen philosophy which is synonymous with CI is the belief that everything can be improved. In order for CI to work an organization must be able to pull people together from different levels and areas within the organization to freely discuss issues within the organization, come up with ideas, evaluate the ideas, choose some of the ideas and carry them out. Every employee must be motivated to accept CI as a means by which the firm can achieve a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Everyone involved must work continuously on their expertise to try to be better than before at all areas in their job. An organization must setup a systematic way to measure its progress and outcome of changes made. One of the most important requirements that an organization has to make in regards implementing CI is that they must have the desire to implement change. The ability to solve problems is the driving force behind continuous improvement. Management and workers have to adapt problem solving as the company culture in order for continuous improvement to be effective. Workers should be trained to identify problems that interrupt, or have the potential to interrupt work flow. Other areas in which workers should be trained to seek improvement are in areas such as decreasing waste, inventory reduction and setup time. One pitfall with continuous improvement is that...