CHAPTER 2
The Role Of Daily Work In Operational Excellence
When I took over the CI role, the company’s president tasked me with ingraining it within our culture, moving beyond mere stand-alone Kaizen events. I entered a work environment where continuous improvement was viewed as an extra burden, something perceived as stealing time from their work or posing a threat to job security. Step one became integrating continuous improvement into their daily tasks through the following initiatives:
• Four hours of CI training annually
• Enhancing their skill set or improving at least one work process each year
• Collaborating on one team project
Continuous improvement needs to evolve into a guiding principle: aiming to enhance your daily tasks every day. It’s vital for employees to approach their work with a fresh perspective, constantly seeking opportunities for minor enhancements every day. Every transaction, customer interaction, and business process serves as a foundation for improvement. Starting small, such as encouraging employees to tidy up desks, network folders, and emails, can have a cumulative impact throughout the organization, resulting in heightened engagement and energy levels.
Waiting to address processes only when they break is a common error. Similar to machines on a manufacturing floor, process design, and infrastructure demand regular maintenance and feedback loops for sustained effectiveness. Open conversations with employees about their tasks, encouraging them to share frustrations with existing processes. Identifying areas for improvement while the process is still functional is key to promoting a proactive approach to enhancement.
For continuous improvement (CI) professionals, addressing these concerns with employees’ managers is crucial, as many individuals may hesitate to raise such issues themselves. If you are a manager, ensure you use encouraging language that emphasizes solutions, steering clear of any words that could be interpreted as assigning blame.
Transforming the culture also means instilling a practice where management consistently poses questions and encourages employees to seek improvements on their own proactively. “Let’s do a CI to fix this” emerged as a straightforward technique to kick-start any improvement project.
Large improvement projects can quickly become overwhelming and should be divided by the amount of effort needed to be completed in a month. These could be handled as multiday improvement events with a facilitator or as a project with a series of team meetings. Teams need to be working on at least one improvement project at all times.
Quality Cost = Prevention Cost + Appraisal Cost + Failure Cost1 The formula above underscores the role of daily work in driving improvement and innovation. Prevention encompasses activities aimed at embedding quality into the product creation or service execution process. Appraisal covers all costs related to inspection or testing. The introduction of complexity introduces numerous hidden costs, including extra steps, workarounds, and additional personnel or processes. Over time, these hidden costs manifest as a slowdown in tasks and increased issues stemming from unforeseen scenarios. Repeate
