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Continuous Improvement in the context of
Organizational Success
Student Name: XXXXXX
Date: 23/11/
Contents
Introduction.................................................................................................................................................... Continuous Improvement: Benefits and Challenges..................................................................................... 3 Application of Continuous Improvement...................................................................................................... 4 Business Environment:.............................................................................................................................. 4 Characteristic of the Product:.................................................................................................................... 5 Process of Manufacturing:......................................................................................................................... 6 Continuous Improvement leading to Change................................................................................................ 7 Organizational Culture:.............................................................................................................................. Design of Organization:............................................................................................................................. 8 Size of the Organization:........................................................................................................................... 9
Successful Management of Change:.......................................................................................................... 9 Continuous Improvement to benefit organizations...................................................................................... Implementing continuous improvement as an organization leader............................................................. 10 Leadership that has the skills to talk: (Gaining support of a leadership team within the organization).. 11 Focusing on prevention of fire and not on fighting the fire..................................................................... 11 Purposeful Constancy.............................................................................................................................. 11 Conclusion................................................................................................................................................... 11 References....................................................................................................................................................
Introduction
Continuous improvement comes from Japanese word “Kaizen”, which refers to activities that continuously improve all functions and involve all employees from CEO to the line workers. Continuous improvement in the context of organization success is an improving process that never ended. This effort needs to be exposed and shall lead to eliminate the root cause of the problem. Continuous improvement normally consist of a range of increments and improvements in small steps other than single overwhelming solution. From the perspective of Japanese word “Kaizen”, no process is perfect, there is always room to improve. This is why continuous improvement is cited as a term of philosophy that can be used to assist all businesses with improving every aspect in relation to their operational process on a consistent basis. The concept of keeping improving is recommended to be applied to all organizations and so their business cultures in order to lead the organizations to success. The aim of this discussion paper is to address how important the continuous improvement will be and how continuous improvement can lead to organization success. The paper will also discuss how the concept can and should be
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(Figure 1: Factors that lead continuous improvement) (Source: Stonebraker et al 2012)
Business Environment: The business environment mentioned in the context of continuous improvement is the forces come from an organization’s operational environment, both internal and external, that may influence the organization’s abilities in competitiveness in the market among certain industries. In most cases, a company’s attitudes, such as its reactions towards these forces, will be considered as the indicators identifying a company’s will in regard to implementing appropriate improvement. A company’s efforts towards making a continuous improvement in relation to the factors appeared in certain market or economic descriptions can directly affect its operations including product/service quality, productivity, customers’ satisfaction levels, and company’s growth rate. While the Porter Five Forces Model mainly focuses on the factors raised from an
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organization’s external environment, a few people may be wondered, for external environment, what if the government imposes some regulations such as to preserve normal competitive order and limit inappropriate competitive behavior, will they benefit an organization? They do bring a few advantages to some organizations. But the degree to which an imposed regulations can save a company from a server condition is limited. Regulation can protect a company from being illegally merged by other organization or individual, but it cannot prevent a failure from a company’s internal collapse. A company must make continuous improvement itself with regard to its management, product, service or operational process in order to survive especially those retail and service industries. Sometimes, management factor can be a huge issue that kills an organization. For example, Bestjet.com, a famous budget airfare booking site in Australia which went bust due to poor management after sold to a new owner. For those larger organizations today, such as the Polaroid, started producing instant photography product and built up great fortune through their product, and was essentially a significant monopoly back then (Maurer et al 2009).However they did not become sluggish, in fact, those companies keep improving their products and services, and grow to today’s market leaders. Today the Polaroid still claims that its instant photography products are the best in the world compared with their competitor’s products.
Characteristic of the Product:
There is an immense impact of product on the continuous improvement process when implemented in the company. Certain factors like the expected life cycle of the product and the process of manufacturing have a straight impact on continuous improvement nature and the level (Maurer et al 2009).
Life of Product: The industry of semi-conductor has products characterized on the basis of the short life production. The life cycle of one generation of a product in this industry is over 2 years. When the case is of short time span in between the generation of products, the process of continuous improvement takes up a distinct form. In the starting phase of generating a new chip, the effort majorly goes in making the line to run and produce a yield which is acceptable. By the time stabilization of process takes place, the product of next generation is brought in and the manufacturing line currently going on is stopped. The engines of operations and the manufacturing do not present much practiced opportunity for practicing improvement in a
The internal factors are countless when it comes to talking about consistent improvement leading a company to success. The internal factors when undergoing continuous improvement process in the organization lead towards change. Change has an impact on everyone involved in the organization. Therefore, this becomes a completely different aspect of this paper discussing the same under different sub-section. However, from the perspective of this paper, we will deal in organizational culture, the design and size of the organization (Maurer et al 2009).
Organizational Culture: Improving continuously is influenced by the prevailing attitude of workforce. This is because continuous improvement brings in change. The culture of organization has a contribution to the attitude of workforce and has various variables within the function inclusive of the average age and the organization of tenure, the culture of company, leadership, atmosphere of economy etc. Improving continuously has a more value when the attitude prevails and changes the values. An example here can be of Hewlett-Packard known very well for the cultures of organization promoting change and innovation. Creativity is important in organizations especially in the way that individuals think and experience a change as a part of the business done by the organization. Innovating environment creation and change are both not easy. This can only be attained by creative leaders and the appreciation of the employees that change is taking place. There are three factors that develop into organization culture. These are foundation and leadership skills of the company, the environment of the industry and business and the societal culture on broad perspective (Jorgensen et al 2009).
The leadership skills in the company influence the aspects of culture. There is a direct impact of leadership on changes when policies and procedures are designed by the management to determine how improvement can be processed continuously. There is a prevailing impact of leadership on the attitude towards change consistently as this attitude is based on espoused values. A team of management that has a value for innovation and change will end up fostering the atmosphere and culture (Maurer et al 2009). This in turn will result in promoting change through consistent improvement. This continuous improvement however has to bring in the concept of change from the top of the organization. The leadership of the company has to start and encourage a continuous improvement in the company. An atmosphere has to develop which fosters the demands of change. It is argued by most companies that the work force that they
possess is empowered and change can be started by any employee who thinks there is an opportunity of bringing about change (Rjinders et al 2010).
Design of Organization:
There is a difficulty in bureaucratic organizations to maintain and sustain the realm of changing and improving through this change continuously. This is because they have harsh hierarchies, long decision making process and procedures of oppressing nature contributing towards innovation being stifled and change being difficult. The problem is present in small organizations as well as the large ones but those organizations that present a tight system of reward linking the objectives of performance to the evaluation of employees, have detailed as well as particular objectives of performance and procedure which is formal to general unique ideas and problem solving flourish towards management of change and improvement consistently (Jorgensen et al 2009).
These are the organizations where formalities such as employees having a set hour of lunch, free coffee and parking lot being open to all are peripheral in nature. What employees are demanded in return is to just get the job done. Even organizations that are successful have a hard time maintaining a slim line in between controlling too much and not sufficient control. Most even try to find ways for increasing the informal control level on the basis of contact based on trust between the top management and the employees. An ultimate objective here is to have order without being rigid (Maurer et al 2009). Creative thinking is encourages here and leads towards increasing awareness in the employees with regard to improving continuously. Special attention is deserved by measurement and the system of reward when the design of organization is discussed. Reward system is a means to obtain motivation and the managers have to considerably take the effect of the systems on desired behavior of employees. An example here can be the rewards of piece rate compensation which involves paying employees on the basis of more work that is done by them. Here there is an incentive to the employee to work as fast as he or she can cranking out products at a faster rate. However, this, can lead to low product quality and a bad behavior impacting the co-workers and the performance of the production house (Jorgensen et al 2009).
Size of the Organization:
When changes take place in the external environment, then the response is continuous improvement. There is a better capability in small firms to adopt a change in the outside
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A change should be therefore, brought in by the common steps of change process implementation. These steps are consistent with plan organization, team implementation, aligning the goals of the business and identifying measurement through improvisation of activity.
Improvement in a continuous way and the proactive change adopter in organizations cannot take place. There cannot be much support by management communication and the support. Each level needs to implement hard work and diligence (Flint 2012).
Continuous Improvement to benefit organizations
Organizations benefit from continuous improvement and the management of change. It is required for improving continuously to understand the process that impacts the aim of organizations, measure the effectiveness of process and the efficiency level and make the processed change on the basis of factual information and technique. When continuously developing and improvising, organizations benefit in the following way (Jorgensen et al 2009):
▲ Sustained leadership of senior management provided with regard to alert attention, support and committing ▲ Clear perspective of the aims of continuous development ▲ Continuous initiatives of improvement being integrated as the business plan of the organization ▲ The improvement benefits being able to be evaluated against the used cost and resources with regard to development and implementation ▲ SMART objectives being set and targets also developed ▲ Methodical approach which is set is simple and practical (Etienne et al 2011) ▲ Improving the data and facts and the beliefs on the status quo being challenged
Implementing continuous improvement as an organization leader
In order to implement the process of continuous improvement as an organization leader it will be important to focus on the following important factors:
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Leadership that has the skills to talk: (Gaining support of a leadership team within the
organization)
This factor is usually the prior factor that will lead towards successful implementation of continuous improvements. The behavior of the leaders should not just show a support for the initiative taken up but their behavior should also show that they want the employees to emulate the same. This will demand guiding and supporting the internal environment aspects of the organization with regard to making the change. If the continuous management program is not supported adequately for making the change to occur then the team working on bringing about consistent improvement will be working towards an individualistic goal (Dessinger et al 2010).
Focusing on prevention of fire and not on fighting the fire
Change in the consistent improvement process cannot be attained if there is no capacity in the organization does to bring about that change. The problem here is that the managers have to focus on fixing the problems and then look for finding their root cause. People will be encouraged to work harder and not just work in a smart way. Incentives should be put forward for those managers who prevented the fire in the first place rather than putting it out (Jager et al 2010).
Purposeful Constancy
Constancy of purpose for continuous product improvement and service improvement was given by Dr. W. Edwards Deming’s. This focus is relentless but needs to maintain the sustained process of improvements in future. It is required that a momentum has to be maintained for ensuring the change cannot be forgotten and resistance should be removed. This will be taken care of while implementing the process of change and continuous improvement (Denver 2010).
Conclusion
As evident from the paper, there are various aspects in an organization which get affected by continuous improvement. But, the process is equally important. When organizations indulge in consistent improvement they go through a process of change but when this change is not managed properly it results in causing a loss to the organization. This paper provides the discrete techniques and the abilities by which continuous change and improvement can be implemented (Cane 2009).
