The
beginning stages of an improvement initiative can be the most challenging.
It is essential to the overall success of your program to create the
optimal infrastructure and improvement plan that works best for your
company and goals. We have listed a few of the main areas of concern
and Smarter Solutions' approach to handling them.
- What do I do?
- There are
many options that may work within your culture and environment.
There is no one right answer.
- Are you at a single location or at multiple locations?
- Is there a large or small workforce?
- What fraction of your employees will participate?
- Do your departments/divisions work well together?
- How much does the organizational leadership wish to be involved?
- Why do you
ask?
- The questions
above are just for starters. The answers are needed to understand
the best path for your organization. What we need to know:
- Is it best to build an improvement organization or to build
independent improvement specialists?
- Is the goal just to fix current problems or to change the
culture to embrace improvement as part of all efforts?
- Is the plan to create a long-term improvement organization?
- What will be
recommended?
- There are three
common paths to follow for an organization. Each will be successful
if applied in the right environment.
- Implementation of an enterprise-wide business system that
engages all facets of the organization.
- Leads to culture changes in all areas of the organization.
- Creation of an improvement organization to target specific
business needs.
- Removes an identified significant problem.
- Training of a few improvement experts to work as internal
consultants.
- Addresses key issues as they develop.
- What are my
risks?
- As with all
business efforts, there is risk involved. Some risks are monetary,
but most are personnel related. Engaging your workforce and leadership
in a business improvement effort will create a mix of excitement
and fear: excitement that something great might be accomplished;
fear that it might just be another program of the month.
- There are examples of companies that used business improvement
methods to gain a competitive advantage and found great successes.
GE is a common example, but there are more.
- There are as many examples of companies that claimed extraordinary
improvement, but then filed for bankruptcy or continued to
struggle financially. Delphi is a common example, but there
are more.
- What drives
the difference in success?
- In a number
of studies, three things frequently surface as key pieces to business
success.
- Top leadership support.
- Bottom-up driven efforts fix problems but do not change
culture.
- Top talent assigned to the effort.
- Select the wrong people and they can-not drive change.
- Constant focus on the business impact, not just on general
improvement.
- Improvements in areas not constraining the organization
feel good but do not move the business ahead.
- What do most
Consultants recommend?
- Train, Train,
Train, Why? Consultants recommend training simply because their
revenue is maximized by training people quickly. The problem with
this plan is the risk of giving individuals skills that the organization
is unable to put to use. The trainees are frustrated and quickly
give up. The skills are not utilized, and the organization has wasted
time and money.
Smarter
Solutions believes:
- Spend time determining the type of deployment you wish to adopt,
and then build the supporting infrastructure before training improvement
practitioners.
- Train practitioners at a rate at which they can be supported.
A smaller group of experts will impact the company better than a
mass training of generalists.
- Evaluate your enterprise business systems to understand where
to apply the improvement resources.
- Adopt performance measures to ensure that the deployment is benefiting
the business.
We call this the Integrated Enterprise Excellence approach. It works
with any type of deployment and significantly improves your probability
of success. Learn
more about our value-add training services geared to provide the 'right'
candidates with an arsenal of six sigma tools and education as it
relates to building an effective, profitable business management system.
Onsite Deployment
support can be provided for pilot testing or small scale startups
using Smarter Solutions’ resources to accelerate the adoption
of the IEE methods.
Lean Six
Sigma Training & Certification
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