Putting your improvement into boxes (categorising it!)

There are various categories of improvement, perhaps the best known being "continuous improvement" (CI). CI is linked to modern quality management.

Quality management's three prongs:-
quality control
quality improvement
quality planning


Feigenbaum's four steps of quality control

Setting Quality standards
Appraising conformance to those standards
Acting when the standards are exceeded
Planning for improvements in the standards

Quality Gurus exist. Deming is one of them. Deming's 14 point plan for the achievement of Total Quality Management (TQM) focuses heavily on improvement (b1p33)

Continuous improvement is often referred to by the Japanese word Kaizen. (ref B822 again).

Examples of kaizen
Quality Circles
Suggestion Schemes

Other tools include benchmarking, traffic light schemes, kaikaku or breakthrough (radical improvement) and kairoy (improvement achieved through innovation and investment in new plant or systems).

Juran defined breakthrough as the following sequence for solving chronic problems:-

1. Convince others that a breakthrough is needed - that a change in quality level is desirable and feasible
2. Identify the vital few projects - determine which quality problem areas are most important
3. Organise for breakthrough in knowledge - define the organisational mechanisms for obtaining missing knowledge
4. Conduct the analysis - collect and analyse the facts that are required and recomment the action needed
5. Determine the effect of proposed changes on the people involved and find ways to overcome the resistance to change.
6. Take action to institute the changes
7. Institute controls to hold the new level

There are two types of innovation - incremental and radical (b822 again - adaptor/innovator).

Leach et al performed a study to examine the attributes of more successful major innovative companies. They are in box 1.4 p36 b1.