Making Continuous Improvement Work in Your Fabrication Shop

People Before Process
When focusing on personnel development, there are three areas in particular that managers should focus on. As the following explains, teamwork, management, and culture all play critical roles in a successful CI program:

• Teamwork. According to the eBook, Five Performance-Boosting Best Practices for Your Industrial Metal-Cutting Company, “continuous improvement initiatives need to be a team effort to be sustainable.” In other words, to improve your industrial metal-cutting operations to its fullest potential, you need to have the right people with the right skills to keep your plan on course. Without a team backing the process, the very notion of any continuous improvement program is impossible. (You can read more about building an effective CI team here.)

• Management. Managing an effective CI team requires a unique set of skills. As another article from Canadian Metalworking explains, because CI systems are a set of integrated systems, the management implications also are a set of intertwined values and approaches. “Organizational improvements very rarely take the form of massive, sweeping change,” the article explains.  “Competent managers seem to have their fingers on all of the smallest details, and effective leaders are often described as “doing all of the little things” that make people feel appreciated, challenged, and engaged.” (To learn more about managing a CI team, read the full article here.)

• Culture. As any shop manager knows, employee “buy-in” is critical to the success of a shop. An operator who cares about his performance and understands how his job affects the company’s overall success is invaluable. The same principle holds true in CI programs, except that everyone needs to buy-in. It needs to be embedded into the company culture. “Building an effective continuous improvement culture is not just about executing a handful of process improvement projects,” explains a report from Deloitte. “That’s a good place to start—and companies may reap tangible rewards from those projects. But more is required to drive sustainable results over time and embed continuous improvement into the very fabric of the organization. That’s when the kind of real, transformational changes take place that can generate hundreds of millions of dollars of opportunities.” (For more information, you can download the full Deloitte report here.)

Sustainable Success
In theory, the concept of constantly improving a business sounds good. However, the truth is that many managers don’t fully understand what it takes to implement a successful CI program.

To be effective, continuous improvement needs to be about more than just a set of process improvement tools. While a tool may help you achieve short-term improvement, it is the people behind the effort that will help you realize continuous, ongoing improvements. Managers who focus on building a strong team and company culture fully devoted to continuous improvement will see long-term, sustainable results.