Continuous Improvement

“Continuous improvement, sometimes called continual improvement, is the ongoing improvement of products, services or processes through incremental and breakthrough improvements. These efforts can seek “incremental” improvement over time or “breakthrough” improvement all at once.

Among the most widely used tools for the continuous improvement model is a four-step quality assurance method—the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle:

• Plan: Identify an opportunity and plan for change.
• Do: Implement the change on a small scale.
• Check: Use data to analyze the results of the change and determine whether it made a difference.
• Act: If the change was successful, implement it on a wider scale and continuously assess your results. If the change did not work, begin the cycle again.

Other widely used methods of continuous improvement, such as Six Sigma, lean, and total quality management, emphasize employee involvement and teamwork, work to measure and systematize processes, and reduce variation, defects, and cycle times.

• Six Sigma is a method that provides organizations tools to improve the capability of their business processes. This increase in performance and decrease in process variation helps lead to defect reduction and improvement in profits, employee morale, and quality of products or services.
• Lean is defined as a set of management practices to improve efficiency and effectiveness by eliminating waste. The core principle of lean is to reduce and eliminate non-value adding activities and waste.
• A core definition of total quality management (TQM) describes a management approach to long-term success through customer satisfaction. In a TQM effort, all members of an organization participate in improving processes, products, services, and the culture in which they work.”