The importance of lean continuous improvement can be seen through the impact it has had on transformation across industries today. The iterative approach to implement incremental improvements calls for an ever-evolving mindset that drives performance levels higher and higher. Modern manufacturing methods constitute a network of interconnected processes that together make up the operational system for producing a product. Improving these processes can be complicated because of the disciplined methodology and sustained effort that is required.

Manufacturers embrace the challenge of implementing lean continuous improvement methodologies because these programs deliver a number of benefits, these include increased customer loyalty, improved value creation and delivery, consumer expectations regarding product improvements, and survival in today’s global economy. Continuous Improvement is a set of tools and techniques that can help you achieve better results.

To implement continuous improvement in your management culture, you must understand the theory behind it.

Approaches for Achieving Lean Continuous Improvement

Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA)

The Plan-Do-Check-Act approach is one of the most popular approaches to achieving continuous improvement; it is also known as the Deming circle. It is a continuous cycle that acts as a continuous feedback loop on how effective your changes are.

In the planning phase, you must establish the objectives and processes necessary to deliver results (the target output or goals). Setting the output expectations is key to achieving lean continuous improvement because the accuracy of the goals and their completeness is a major part of the improvement process. The approach can then be applied on a small scale before being implemented across all the necessary processes.

The second step of the process is to evaluate the results. After you’ve identified your objectives, compare these to your expectations. You must also collect data at this stage and start to consider improvements that can be made next time. If the analysis shows that you’ve improved compared to your last project, the standard stays as it was for this project. If you’ve failed to improve or the results are worse than the last project, the standard must be updated, and you need to aim for an even better performance next time.

Root Cause Analysis (RCA)

Root cause analysis is a technique used in lean manufacturing as part of the Kaizen continuous improvement process to identify the root causes of problems and work toward preventing them from recurring. The iterative process involves investigating what caused the undesirable effect, drilling down until you reach the source of that problem, and then implementing a solution to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

For instance, say your company has just released an update for a popular app, and your support team has been bombarded with bug reports from customers. You determine that the problem occurred because your quality assurance team failed to run all the necessary tests on the software before releasing it, so you investigate why that occurred.

Digging into the problem, you discover that your developers provided the quality assurance team with last minute features which prevented them from completing their tasks on time. You then brainstorm ways to prevent this from happening in the future by giving your developers more time for testing or setting stricter deadlines for the quality assurance team as to when features need to be submitted by.

After discovering that the developers had finished most features right before submitting them for quality assurance, you investigate why this happened. Digging deeper into the reason for this, you discover that your development team had taken more time than you’d planned to develop the features in the first place. Analysing why this occurred, you conclude that your team was inefficient, because each developer simultaneously worked on multiple features. They submitted a batch to the quality assurance team that was too large to process on short notice.

To avoid similar problems in the future, you suggest placing regulations on the amount of work that can be done simultaneously to ensure an evenness throughout the process. The root cause analysis must determine the root cause of the negative effect to prevent similar problems from happening in the future.

Applying the Lean Kanban Methodology

To continue to improve your abilities, you must visualise areas for improvement. It is important to have this visibility in your processes to identify what needs to be improved before it is too late. Toyota developed a system called Kanban that was inspired by something called knowledge-work management, and it relies on six core practices for waste minimisation in a process:

1. Visualise the workflow and make it clear;

2. Eliminate interruptions and remove communication bottlenecks;

3. Manage flow and sustain momentum;

4. Make process policies explicit, share information;

5. Create feedback loops and learn from experience;

6. Improve collaboratively through collective wisdom.

The Kanban method asks you to visualise your workflow on a whiteboard. Prepare three columns- ‘Requested’, ‘In Progress’ and ‘Done’ – then write a Kanban card for each task that your team is working on (originally in the form of a post-it note), move it across the board – it must pass through all three stages of the workflow- until it is considered complete.

Kanban boards allow you to monitor the evenness of your process and can be a serious weapon for minimising Mura (unevenness- a lean manufacturing tool). The board also shows you the amount of work that everyone on your team has (and can help you prevent burnout by allowing you to delegate tasks according to the capacity of different team members). Finally, you can monitor the pace at which work is progressing across the workflow and achieve lean continuous improvement for your workflow efficiency.

Kanban is a visual management tool for Lean management. It eliminates multitasking by keeping track of only the work that is currently in progress. By not letting workers start new tasks until previous assignments are completed and added to the “Done” pile, Kanban helps prevent bottlenecks in your process and keeps you productive.

Checkpointing helps you analyse your workflow to determine which tasks are taking too long. To improve your workflow, you can focus on your process flow and/or try different steps to identify improvements for your system. You can start on this by focusing on the performance of your team as a group and helping them understand the goals they need to achieve together.

The Kanban board is a useful feedback tool because it shows who is doing what task at any time. Daily stand-up meetings can also be used as a feedback-sharing practice; they allow individuals to regularly share information on a project they are working on whether that is updates, feedback, or if a problem has arisen.

Other lean continuous improvement practices are the Gemba walk and the A3 report; both are extremely useful, and can help you discover areas where your workflow is problematic.

Unlimited Opportunities for Growth and Improvement

Manufacturers and businesses face opportunities for improvement in a variety of areas. The four most common and well-known include:

1. Reducing manufacturing defects
2. Lowering scrap costs
3. Shortening cycle times
4. Reducing lead time 

More research and resources (such as time and money) are needed in order to improve the following areas:

• Workforce cooperation, engagement, morale, and job satisfaction can be improved by examining managerial practices
• Good product design can increase customer satisfaction by including a feature that meets customer needs or increases reliability and productivity
• Industrial process productivity can be improved by examining ways to reduce employee wait time or unnecessary movements

There are many ways to achieve continuous improvement. All of them have one thing in common—comparing what is done to what was accomplished in the past. Use lean continuous improvement consulting services to help your clients resolve their weak spots through a process-assessment, problem-identification and solution-recommendation system.

To sustain continuous improvement: minimise waste, create suitable environments for your team to improve, implement the PDCA cycle (plan-do-check-act), and work backwards to identify root causes. Adopt the Kanban system for workflow management.