Archive for April, 2009
A Culture Change
True continuous improvement occurs all the time, every day, by everybody within your organization. Too often, businesses perform only continual improvement activities, those activities that might help improve the quality management system and operations, but only periodically. Examples of continual improvement activities might include responding to a customer complaint, and internal audit finding, a Six Sigma Project, or a monthly kaizen event.
What is the difference between continual and continuous process improvement? Continual improvement involves processes that have both a start and end point, whereas continuous improvement processes are never ending and promote change that drives the evolution of your business process. A culture change in thinking about how you run your business can help to reach this goal.
Building a culture within your organization that will promote continuous business process improvement activities so that all employees are involved with the improvement process every single day can be a daunting task. How does your organization build greater accountability and discipline in adhering to processes and procedures?
Business Process Improvement
All of us have been in a business process improvement or sales meeting where the speaker clicks through a PowerPoint presentation showing charts and numbers. Few people, if any, take anything away from those meetings. But put the same information in the context of a story and the point is made.
When you tell a story, people understand what the mission is and they understand how they can make it happen. If you just talk at a high level of mission and vision the reaction is, “What am I supposed to do with that!?”
Improving Your Business
Business owners know that it’s important to make continual efforts to improve the quality and efficiency of business. For this reason, the ISO 9000 quality management system was created to ensure that a business runs at maximum potential. Businesses that can claim they are ISO 9001 certified receive a certain degree of respect from other business owners, indicating the business is formalized and operating efficiently. There are several requirements in an ISO 9001 certification, including:
~ maintaining adequate records
~ regular reviews of process and the effectiveness of the quality system
~ monitoring processes to ensure effectiveness
~ checking for defects with appropriate corrective action
~ fostering continual improvement
Businesses must adhere to stringent standards in order to meet the requirements of ISO 9001 certification. The standards for ISO 9001 were originally used to monitor manufacturing, but now are applied to several other fields. You can purchase ISO 9001 software to work towards meeting ISO 9001 requirements and a more efficient business.