Step 3 of 5: Implementing the Four Fundamentals

Back to: Foundational Continuous Improvement for Leaders

As was mentioned already in our article Getting Started with Continuous Improvement, there are 5 steps to establishing a culture of continuous improvement. In this article, we will discuss the third step which is to implement the four fundamentals of continuous improvement. Now that continuous improvement has been introduced to your team and they are working on simple improvements, its time to focus everyone’s improvement efforts on developing mastery in four fundamental areas:

Creating good flow of value to your customers
Standardizing work to create stability and quality
Building high levels of quality into the process
Removing waste and improving the process

The CIU system of continuous improvement (CI) is designed to help you achieve the goals below:

Highest Quality
Shortest Processing Time
Lowest Cost

Each of the four fundamental principles you will learn below are designed to help you be more successful by improving the quality of your work. Quality is always the first and most important goal of CI. Improvements in time or cost are never made at the expense of quality. Second, CI is designed to help you improve your speed of execution. Faster service will make your customers happier. Lastly, CI will help you find ways to lower cost for doing your work. Success can be achieved when you balance all three: quality service, shorter processing time and lower costs than your competition. These three goals are often referred to as Quality, Delivery and Cost (QDC).

Create a Good Flow of Value to Your Customers- Take Care of Needs First

The purpose of any process is to deliver value for the customer. We often refer to this as the “customer experience”. When it comes to designing a good process to achieve a good outcome, the best way to achieve this is to design a process that will deliver the best value to the customer without interruptions. This is called flow. The better the process flows, the more value it can deliver and the happier the customer will be. Think about ordering a meal at your favorite fast food chain. Most likely they have developed a smooth flowing process to take your order and get you your food quickly with good quality. Otherwise, you probably wouldn’t like to eat there. Now think about a time when you had terrible service somewhere and ended up waiting a long time for something. That’s an example of poor flow. Which of the pictures below best represents your process?

In order to create good flow you must be constantly examining your processes to find ways to improve the flow. What barriers are getting in the way and impeding the flow of value added services to the customer? Can you remove any of those barriers to improve the flow? This is one of the most fundamental principles of CI. Do you have gaping holes in your process flow? Long delays in delivery? Focus your team on attacking these and creating good flow. It should at least flow well enough to give you stability and allow you to sustainably run your business. Getting to at least that level is your priority. Even a well-established process can have delivery issues, so look closely at your process and discover where you can improve the flow. Ask your team for ideas. Ask your customers. Once you see the areas for opportunity, focus your team on attacking those gaps, improve the flow, and impress your customers with you speedy execution.

Do you have gaping holes in your process flow? Long delays in delivery? Focus your team on attacking these and creating good flow. It should at least flow well enough to give you stability and allow you to sustainably run your business. Getting to at least that level is your priority. Even a well-established process can have delivery issues, so look closely at your process and discover where you can improve the flow. Ask your team for ideas. Ask your customers. Once you see the areas for opportunity, focus your team on attacking those gaps, improve the flow, and impress your customers with you speedy execution.

Standard Work- Bring Stability & Consistency to Your Process

The foundation of achieving these goals is in creating stability in the workflow of your process. Stability is best achieved first through the utilization of standard work. In simple terms, standard work is the documented steps one needs to take in order to complete a process. If you do not have the right process steps in place, then it will be difficult to deliver high quality on a consistent basis. Standard work helps to create habits and routine which bring stability to the process. It also becomes a first place to look for the root causes of defects and repair them. Lastly, the standard work enables improvements to be made with confidence. In many cases the standard work will be an Excel or Word document outlining the work flow of the process, but there are many different ways to document it. Some examples are given below.

Example 1: Here is a familiar form of standard work- Lego instructions

Example 2: This pre-flight checklist is a very common for of standard work in the airline industry

Example 3: Here are standard work instructions you might have seen on an airplane for inflating the escaper slide

Example 4: Many sports like football are only possible through the use of standard work- rules, procedures, plays, side lines, yard lines, referees… you get the point.

If your team has gaps in standard work, or worse yet doesn’t have any standard work, then this is a great place to have your team members focus their improvement efforts. For their improvement projects, have them create or enhance the standard work for your key workflows, and you will not be disappointed with the results.

Build Quality Into the Process

Quality is a subjective term which can be defined differently depending on the person. Dictionary.com defines quality as being of high grade, superiority, or excellence. The American Society of Quality defines it as a product or service free of deficiencies. While people may have differing opinions on how to define it, the customer’s definition of quality is the one that matters the most.

Built-in quality (BIQ) means that every step of the process is designed to achieve high quality and to prevent any quality defects from entering the process or being passed on to the customer. Quality inspections are not just an afterthought that happens haphazardly at the very end, but rather they are occurring constantly throughout the process. The work is designed to detect quality errors or to prevent them from occurring all together. In basic terms “built-in quality” can be achieved by doing these three things:

Do not “accept” quality defects into your process
Do not “make” quality defects in your process
Do not “pass-on” quality defects to your customer

This is a great area in which to challenge your team to make improvements. Have them tackle your biggest sources of customer complaints, product defects, or common mistakes that happen again and again. Let your team solve these problems for you, and reap the satisfaction that comes with fixing things. Once your team has tackled the basic process flow needs and established solid standard work, building process quality should be the next evolution.

Remove Waste and Improve the Process

As Taiichi Ohno explains in this statement below, improvement is all about removing waste from processes. This is one of the fundamental principles of Lean & Continuous Improvement. Being lean means systematically removing anything impeding the free flow of value to the receiving party. But what exactly is “waste” and how do you eliminate it?

“All we are doing is looking at the time line; from the moment the customer gives us an order to the point when we collect cash. We are reducing that time line by removing the non-value-added wastes.” -Taiichi Ohno, Father of the Toyota Production System

Waste can mean many different things to different people, but in Lean & Continuous Improvement it has a very specific definition. In fact waste can be broken down to 7 simple elements called the “7 wastes”.

Transportation
Inventory
Motion
Waiting
Overproduction
Overprocessing
Defects

For a full explanation of each of the 7 wastes, check out our full course on Waste Elimination.

Have your team analyze your processes, find the waste, and remove it. This will give you the biggest bang for you buck when it comes to improvement projects. If your team members projects are improving quality and eliminating waste, then you are on the right track. This is the foundational essence of a continuous improvement culture.