Most companies spend too much time on improvement activities
Many companies I work with claim that there is no time for improvement activities – daily business has the priority.
Improvement activities are of course taking place, but it seems like that often when a new idea is coming up nobody has the time to make it come true and thereby cashing in the benefit for the company.
There are two main reasons for this:
•Improvement activities are carried through by very few people
•The improvement process is slow and inefficient
With only few people working on improvement activities there is very little spare capacity to engage. That is why most companies feel that they don’t have the time to run additional improvements when required. Involving more employees could be a solution.
But the main problem is that the improvement process is slow and inefficient.
Would you accept that there were no time for order handling, production, purchase and other “business processes” and that these processes were not efficient ? Are you trying to reduce cost and increase impact of these ? Most companies are. But knowing that continuous improvements are key to your business performance why is it that it is not seen as a “business process” and why are you not expecting short leadtime and high efficiency on such a critical activity ?
One reason is probably that many companies simply don’t know how to establish an efficient and fast continuous improvement process and are not able to measure the efficiency and financial impact of it.
So, the question is not if you have time to run improvement activities – the question is if you are wasting time on an inefficient process.
Holleskov Consulting knows how to set-up an efficient continuous improvement process and how to measure it. Contact us if you want to spend less time on improvement activities but get better results.